Time travels and the (de)construction of contemporary myths
(In September 2011, the Spanish media & video art distribution platform HAMACA invited me to curate a text-based itinerary through their extensive moving image catalogue. This is the result.)
Throughout this itinerary, I would like to navigate through the HAMACA catalogue in search of traces or residues from other times and voices. I am looking to identify the little or great homages that artists make to other “artists-legends” or to the “landmark moments” in their history (understood both on a collective and an individual level). What I will engage with here is the unravelling of nostalgic impulses in art, led by a (perhaps unhealthy?) curiosity to get to the bottom of the archetypes that have come into play in the creative process of these artists.
In his “Mythologies”, Barthes said that a myth is nothing other than a distortion of history; a new ‘discourse’, born through the appropriation of a previously existing image. This re-writing of a sign is in itself a creative act. It isn’t just a cultural appropriation, but a translation or update of meaning through time. This temporal dislocation, intrinsic to the act of incorporating elements from other socio-historical contexts, is also fundamental in this stroll through the catalogue, where the evocations of the past, explorations of the present, and fantasies of the future merge unevenly, provoking a sense of vertigo towards a continuous and never-ending present.
Love the myth. Kill the myth
Our first stop is Little Star (1994) by Clemente Calvo, a popular legend transformed into a small visual tale. Calvo, who lived in New York at the time the piece was made, incorporates a legend that amongst the Indians who lived in Manhattan before the arrival of European colonisers was a small group of shamans whose souls turned into white, seven-pointed starfish when they died. Those lucky enough to find one of the starfish would enjoy the protection of the shamans forever. The plot’s temporal dimension takes us to a particular historical moment of the 17th century, yet the piece formally looks like a homage to silent film and, in particular, to the films of Jean Cocteau. With a piano piece by Liszt as its sole soundtrack, its use of black and white and poetic images with surrealist overtones, the piece inevitably takes us back to the universe of the French genius.
'Little Star' (1994) by Clemente Calvo
Following along the surrealist trail, Espejismo (1993), by Maite Cajaraville, offers a trip “through the looking glass”, in an obvious reference to the author of Alice in Wonderland, the British writer Lewis Carroll. Yet the aesthetics of this dream, set in primary colours and geometries, are clearly those of a digital landscape. Espejismo is more a memory of the future than one of the past, and is tremendously contemporary in its hybrid mix of 3D and psychedelia with New Age overtones, all of which awaken a strong devotion in many contemporary artists who, like Cory Arcangel, are obsessed with 90s digital aesthetics.
'Espejismo' (1993) by Maite Cajaraville
SIS. E3 (Servidumbre de la vida y el carácter de las sombras) (2000-2001), by the Basque artist Txomín Badiola, holds the accumulation of references and symbols as one of its fundamental ingredients. In only 4 minutes, we witness the invocation of various cultural myths, placed in that temporal grey zone that lies between modernism and post-modernism, and which includes the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Jean-Luc Godard, the art of Jorge Oteiza and the industrial design of Charles & Ray Eames. The piece freely recreates the final scene from Der Amerikanische Soldat (1970), by Fassbinder. Godard said that his death had been caused by “an overdose of creative obligations”, a sentence we can read on one of the stage walls in the piece. Whilst one of the actors wears a t-shirt with a fragment of La Ley de los Cambios, by Jorge Oteiza, another dons one with S.O.S. written on it. Both messages are on view while both men roll on the ground, between the Eames’ chairs. Shot 30 years after the original film was made, and using contemporary looking actors -who are however trapped in a melange of times and ideologies between the homage and the critique-, SOS. E3 appears to represent the footprint of our most recent cultural past, like a heavy embrace from which we cannot (and perhaps should not) escape.
'SOS. E3 ( Servidumbre de la vida y el carácter de las sombras)' (2000-2001) by Txomín Badiola
Seeing as Jean-Luc Godard rears his head, it seems relevant to speak about El Enemigo (2010), by WeareQQ. El Enemigo is a reworking of that Godardian myth called La Chinoise (1967). The young protagonists’ endearing and pedagogic verbal diarrhoea, the film credits, the domestic interiors, and the dry humour it oozes, are inherited from the original, which is however nothing more than a shell, or an excuse, to speak about certain subjects. A stage set within which the characters -cultural agents orchestrated by WeareQQ- offer a series of porous monologues where political, economic, cultural, and even emotional critiques are intertwined.
Speaking of the critique and deconstruction of myths, we may find no example more powerful within the history of the moving image in Spain than Rocío (1980), by Fernando Ruiz de Vergara. This is a documentary where a Catholic rite -the procession of the Virgen del Rocío-, is taken apart with precision, through the use of facts, and, by extension, so are the rest of the rites of Marian devotion. This was a touchy subject for a democracy still in its infancy, leading to several fragments of the film being censored, and to its author being condemned to two years in prison plus a fine of 10 million pesetas. Rocío is still, even today, a work that is little known, and terribly underrated. A good number of brilliant shots and a wise use of archive footage hold up a brave and controversial thesis for which its author paid an unmistakably draconian and absurd price.
'Rocío' (1980) by Fernando Ruiz Vergara
I also find Duchamp (retard en vídeo) (1986/87), by Eugeni Bonet, to be an essential work for a number of reasons. Not only is it a comprehensive documentary about Marcel Duchamp, it is also, in my opinion, a clear precursor of the “performative documentary” that has gained such visibility and followers since the 90s, both in the field of film and video in general, and in contemporary art in particular, with examples that go from media celebrities like Michael Moore to artists such as Mario García Torres or Duncan Campbell. In this case, a casual, humorous conversation between a couple is used to structure a narrative about Duchamp’s life, work, and impact, from his early stages as a painter -culminating with The Large Glass-, to his subsequent development of conceptual art through the readymade. Finally, it is worth mentioning that this documentary was broadcast on TV3 in 1987 as part of the TV show “Arsenal”. Without a doubt, the porosity between mass media, conceptual art and history is an exciting phenomenon, researched by the curator Chus Martínez in her recent exhibition at the MACBA, titled “Are you Ready for TV?”.
'Duchamp (retard en vídeo)' (1986-1987) by Eugeni Bonet
Time Distortions: Here come the ghosts
There is something exquisitely unsettling about Medio Tiempo (1964), by Manel Muntaner. Tension grows, due to an unsettling soundtrack by Schaeffer and Stockhausen, among others, as we are guided through spaces that are suspended in time. These are different rooms within a school, ‘paused’ during the summer, waiting to be reactivated by the students’ return. Medio Tiempo is a pioneer in the history of Spanish experimental film, a sophisticated metaphor of childhood within which Muntaner shows an extraordinary sensibility for composition and framing. The result is a nostalgic reminiscence of the first years of school, a time when freedom and play intermingle with fear and a castrating authority that is often only imagined, but equally sinister.
One of the qualities present in Nummulitis (2002-2004), by Isaki Lacuesta, that I find most interesting, is the fact that he renders visible the overwhelming capacity that black and white images have for creating meaning. As if sharing the same texture resulted in an alchemy that turns disparate images into analogous ones. Different scenes from a procession, a televised film, and a group of friends in a bar appear to blend into the same, strange, temporal space, in a simulacrum of continuity.
With similar ends, but completely different means, Mabel Palacín’s in Una noche sin fin (2006-2008) makes use of the two-channel installation to explore the absolute relativity of the perception of time. On one screen actions appear to be slowed down; dense, whilst on the other screen, everything seems somewhat speeded up; frantic. As a viewer, the experience is disquieting, and this is intensified by the theatricality of the installation, where the two screens are facing one another and separated by a bench where the viewer, seated, is forced to look one way or the other. The situations and speeds change from one screen to the other, so that any intention of continuity is constantly frustrated, but somehow encouraged by the repetition of characters and backdrops. The viewer’s capacity for attention, patience, and curiosity are put to the test during the 23 minutes of this work. When it ends, he may not know what he’s seen, but he can be sure he has learned to look at things differently.
'Una noche sin fin' (2006-2008) by Mabel Palacin
In El Año en que el Futuro Acabó (Comenzó) (2007), Marcelo Expósito plays at undoing history. Looking through a viewfinder, we witness a chronologically inverted itinerary through archive footage that begins during Spain’s first democratic elections after Franco’s death, and end with the beginning of the Civil War in 1936. The inversion of the temporal axis generates questions about the (in) evitability of the events. Is there any escape from history’s repetitive and ruthless cycle? Couldn’t these skulls, found in the excavation of the final scene (remains from the republican soldiers, in fact) belong to the ghosts of a past civilisation, or the dead from the future? The key, in keeping with the inverted structure of the piece, lies at the beginning: the primary audience of this phantasmagoria is a group of children. The only possible salvation for the future therefore lies in knowing how to learn from past mistakes. As Heiner Müller says in the quote that opens this journey through time: memory is not mere contemplation, it is work.
'El Año en que el Futuro Acabó (Comenzó)' (2007) by Marcelo Expósito
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This text was originally written and published in Spanish. You can read the original here.
English translation by Alex Reynolds, whom I would like to thank for her meticulous and considerate work.
HAMACA is a Barcelona-based distribution platform of Spanish media & video art. Explore their catalogue here.
Rosa Barba & Hilary Lloyd: dance with projector
They say stoicism’s cradle was Greece, third century BC. A long time and a long way from contemporary London, a city where just the perils and anxieties of commuting to work in the morning (if one was lucky enough to have one of those) are enough to make anyone loose the will to live. With enough stoic disposition, however, London offers any devoted artistic sufferer enough thrills to make this kind of pedestrian miseries very much worth her while.
Last week, in the space of just one day, I had the pleasure of consecutively visiting two extraordinary exhibitions by two artists working within the expanded field of moving image, and whose specific particularities are just as fascinating as their meeting point: employing the projecting technology of their images as an active and essential part of the works, adding a heavy layer of theatrical and sculptural qualities to their installations.
Hilary Lloyd, Trousers, 2010. 2 Panasonic PT-DW5100U Projectors, 2 Pioneer DVD-V7300D Players, 4 Unicol Suspension Units. Dimensions variable. Photograph by Marcus J. Leith. Courtesy of Raven Row.
The first stop was of my pilgrimage was Rosa Barba’s show at Tate Modern’s Level 2 Gallery. Barba’s practice has come to exemplify the current and ubiquitous come-back of the celluloid projector –clattering sound and flickering light included– to the gallery and its pervasive re-incorporation to the lexicon of artists’ films in the last few years. Her inclination for the 16mm and 35mm paraphernalia and sculptural use of modified projectors (John Cage and his ‘modified pianos’ quickly spring to mind) has won her as much international acclaim as her carefully crafted films.
Installation view of Rosa Barba’s exhibition at Tate Modern. Photo : Tate Photography © Rosa Barba
On the other side of the river Thames, in the sophisticatedly stripped-bare Victorian house that is Raven Row, the British artist Hilary Lloyd gives yet another master class on her use of projecting equipment as decisive part of the works mis-en-scéne. What makes Lloyd’s particularly striking to the eye these days is her utter embrace of the digital technology. In a moment where Barba’s nostalgic and predominant discourse could be understood as the triumph of the obsolete, a longing for the archaic and a sort of fetishism for retro textures, Lloyd’s unapologetic endorsement of state of the art gear feels like very fresh, almost optimistic, position to take.
Moreover, she not only plays with digital projectors. Huge plasma screens, dvd players, speakers and even the poles that hold them in place are all exquisitely choreographed in groups of slightly menacing art-machines. The apparatus are so important and specifically chosen that they are enumerated in the description of the works. For Lloyd even the cables –whose exhibiting fate usually involves being obliterated and hidden under wall-matching gaffer tape– are also worthy material: they are painstakingly arranged in geometrical and very visible lines crossing the ceiling and forming strict patterns that would probably overwhelm fellow cable-lover artists like Alberto Tadiello.
Hilary Lloyd, Motorway, 2010. 4 Sanyo PLC-XP100 Projectors, 4 Pioneer DVD-V7300D Players, Cambridge Integrated A5 Amplifier, 9 Unicol Suspension Units, JBL Control 23 Speakers. Photograph by Marcus J. Leith. Courtesy of Raven Row.
Obviously the ‘spot the difference’ game between these two artists is only sustainable and entertaining on a formal level. Content-wise their preoccupations and the language chosen to talk about them are miles apart. Lloyd’s works at Raven Row employ video, photography and slides to create a hybrid result which could be defined somehow as ‘moving collages’. Motorway and Man, for example, play with composites of four and six moving images respectively –whose movements are more or less evident– and that force the viewer to find a suitable viewing spot between the bunch of projectors, hanging from the ceiling to the viewer’s body level. They are not only very present, they are almost intrusive. Their strict and symmetrical placement only helps to reinforce the sense of control and restrain that Lloyd seems to exert on her works. Motorway depicts a series of girders to a soundtrack of passing cars, and Man shows images from an male underwear ad, cropped to the groin area. Interestingly, both works result just as cold and asexual. Metal and human body are both treated as objects, mere raw material for visual compositions. As are the crane and the man’s legs of Crane and Trousers, two diptychs in movement with serious hypnotic appeal.
Hilary Lloyd, Man, 2010. 6 Sanyo PLC-XP100 Projector, 6 Pioneer DVD-V7300D Players, 12 Unicol Suspension Unit. Photograph by Marcus J. Leith. Courtesy of Raven Row.
This is Hilary Lloyd’s (Halifax, 1964) first large scale exhibition in London in 10 years. An artist’s artists, she remains fairly unknown for the wide public despite having had solo shows at Tramway (Glasgow, 2009), Munich Kunstverein (2006) or Chisenhale Gallery (London, 1999) and being represented by Sadie Coles HQ (London) and Galerie Neu (Berlin). She is a rara avis in the contemporary art world who, despite obvious talent, shied away early on from the temptations of a quick but short-lived recognition in favour of a slow development of her style and unique voice. Clearly a long-distance runner, the press release for the exhibition reveals she has been preparing this show for three years, since the very inception of Raven Row.
Rosa Barba (Italy, 1972), on the contrary, has been a permanent fixture in the contemporary art scene in the past few years, including shows at Birnbaum’s Venice Biennale (2009) and his Torino Triennale, 50 Moons of Saturn (2008), this year’s Liverpool Bienial, Centre International D’Art et du Paysage (2009) and Stedelijk Museum amongst many others. Her practice oscillates between narratives, where she delicately weaves fact and fiction, as seen on Outwardly, from Earth’s Centre (2007), o fluxus-inspired films where textures and languages are the protagonists, like It’s Gonna Happen (2005) or Let Me See (2009). Mapping is also one of he recurrent concerns. Her resolute use of archaic equipment is perhaps a tool of critical nostalgia, a refusal to reckon some of the aspects and implications of current film making as an artistic practice. In that case, Lloyd’s is an audacious refusal of any nostalgic reminiscing about the “good old days”. Two different strategies to help us explore the way we look at things and how we navigate our way around them. Isn’t it exactly why art is such a thrilling pursuit?
Rosa Barba Stating the Real Sublime, 2009. Installation at the Tate. Photo: Tate Photography © Rosa Barba
Weekend & La Chinoise: Why these two Godard’s 1967 masterpieces are still relevant today
It is no breaking news: many of us will agree that Jean Luc Godard is a genius and key filmmaker in the history of cinema. But, as any interesting genius, he can be extremely gifted at some times and completely annoying at others. The irritation experienced when seeing Anna Karina in the (a bit shallow but playful) musical melodrama Une femme est une femme (1961) is only comparable to the admiration one feels for him when seeing the two movies he directed in 1967 –probably his most inspired year as far as I am concerned: Weekend and La Chinoise.
It is also important to note that Une femme est un femme was only his second long feature, released after his iconic debut A bout de souffle (1959), whereas his two 1967 works represent a much more mature stage in his career and, undoubtedly, mark the beginning of a period where his political engagement took over more pedestrian subject matters like love and relationships. Godard also finally jilted traditional narratives (ie. a plot, a “story”) and took to the extreme his interest in cinematic fragments and disconnected structures,– rhizomatic if you like, to use Deleuze’s omnipresent concept. 1967, actually, is considered the end of Godard’s Nouvelle Vague period, as from 1968 till 1972 he joined the Marxist filmmaking group Dziga Vertov and became even more experimental and unapologetically radical.
In 1967, in a pre-riot Paris and with Situationist and other political groups warming up the social landscape, Godard presented two very different but equally critical strange films that summarised the European zeigeist and discontent. Weekend was an acid (note the pun) critique of the hegemonic bourgeois values through a quite disturbing movie which, at first sight, is about a couple’s weekend trip outside Paris but that, behind that façade, illustrates the deceit and violence (murder, cannibalism and car crashes) that capitalism fuels. The starring couple, a middle-high class marriage, make the aforementioned weekend country trip to visit the woman’s parents. They want to get rid of them to obtain a more than healthy inheritance. But we learn that they also want to get rid of each other once they get the money, as they both have lovers with who they’d much rather enjoy it. On their trip back, after a nightmarish succession of traffic jams and accidents, as well as some encounters with working class farmers who give us some political speeches about class struggle, they finally manage to get abducted by a gang of marxist hippies who turn out to be also practising cannibals. Influenced as much by George Bataille’s philosophy as by Marx, one of the highlights of Weekend shows us a woman screaming in terror after a horrible crash car. What we think is a person’s cling for dear life turns to be a complain about the loss of her Hermes bag.
The subversion Godard achieves with Weekend and his fascination with car crashes and bodies could be read as an anticipation of JG Ballard’s novel Crash, that was published 6 years later, in 1973, which takes this premise to the limit: a group of deranged fetishists play with death and sex as they crash their cars in the highways of London. But while for Godard the crucial point to be addressed is how capitalism and liberal politics engender frustration and thus violence, Ballard seems more fixed with the relationship between the everyday, sex and technology. Indeed technology in Crash is the representation of the bourgeois class, that bored and stuck, need to indulge in perversion to feel alive again (through sex and cars in violent communion). Godard goes from the particular to the general, a bigger picture of the classes, while Ballard prefers to engage in the very personal life of a group of people and let the reader draw general conclusions.
La Chinoise, on the other hand, provides good material to reflect on the aesthetics of radical politics. And the way Godard constructed this reflection is still relevant today, I believe, even if the slogans and the pure communist ideology used are definitely dated. This film about a group of university students learning by heart Mao’s Little Red Book during a summer and organising a terrorist attack in 1967 seems amazingly prescient of the following’s year May revolution. La Chinoise is especially interesting to me in that Godard, even if a convinced Marxist, is keen on exploring the contradiction in which these well-off bourgeois youngsters incur. They want a revolution, because for them it sounds good, it sounds fair, but when questioned in depth about it, they only can stammer cliches and slogans. The train conversation that Veronique (Anne Wiazemsky), the main character, has with her university teacher, the philosopher Francis Jeanson, is an excellent example of this and a key scene in left-wing cinema *. Veronique wants blood because revolutions are only revolutions if blood is shed. But the teacher is able to deconstruct all Veronique’s apparently security in her ideas in a matter of seconds, and he shows that she really doesn’t know what she wants to achieve or what will happen after the attacks, anticipatory again of what would happen also a year later with the actions of the Baader-Meinhof. Here again, like in Weekend, Godard uses violence to pose poignant questions about the state of society and politics. Jeanson’s dialogue is also prescient in that he talks about “culture-action” and claims that culture, which gives control of the world, has been long time ago cut off from action and has to be reunited to allow the participation of the public, which remind us of what Nicolas Bourriaud argued 30 years later in Esthetique Relationelle. As it is habitual in all Godard’s films, the use of constant contemporary cultural references (names of politicians, names of filmmakers, Jacques Rivette, Mick Jagger) produces a sense of witnessing something real, that what these characters are living is happening somewhere else in real life. His films are the perfect zeitgeist artifacts. They are pertinent and dense, at times high-brow but hilarious at others. And because of that they do not become outdated but historical, and worth revisiting time and again, as with each screening one discovers something new.
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* The Otolith Group used the soundtrack of this scene for their piece Communist Like Us (2006-present).
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