Painting … is a creature of duration insofar as the perception of it is something that must be developed. Its emergent properties come out only in the chemical bath, as it were, of sustained attention.
APPROACHES TO PAINTED SURFACES
If, as Eisenstein suggests, film and, by extension, moving image installation descends down one line from architecture, then another branch must necessarily proceed from painting, that other ‘creature of duration’. There are obvious continuities across both practices arising from formal considerations – both moving image and painting organise pictorial elements: shapes, textures, colours, light and dark into readable signs, for the most part defined by a frame, singly or in series. The orchestration of these components draws on compositional principles, forms of staging that were developed in painting; Paul Sharits, for instance brought ‘the act of presenting and viewing a film as close as possible to the conditions of hanging and looking at a painting’.2 The viewer comes to installation with a trained eye for pictures, one that today is also well versed in the grammar of film, video and digital media. She can appreciate not only the maker’s skills in the deployment of forms and colours within a single frame, but also the artist’s ability to compose pictorial elements across multiple frames. The filmmaker choreographs animated, moving parts that evolve over time, accompanied by an audio track that may synchronise to the imagery or run counter to it, recalibrating the meaning of the screen content. Where film and video evoke movement, and produce sound in time, installation contributes a consideration of how the screen image develops a spatial relationship with other entities beyond its own frame. In common with a static image, a moving image, whether contained within the delimited frame of a monitor with what Briony Fer refers to as ‘sealed edges’ or spilling across a space onto a variety of surfaces, arrests the viewer.3 Once her interest is snared, she is beguiled into an engagement with the work, an encounter that might well include aesthetic pleasure as well as intellectual stimulation. In order to successfully detain the viewer, physically and psychologically, the author of a moving image installation needs to be blessed with a painter’s eye, an architect’s feel for space and a composer’s understanding of time and rhythm. Some of the tools may have changed, but the basic skills required for an artist working today were well established over five hundred years ago. The difference now is that more of them need to be united in any individual practitioner. As Schwabsky suggests, in both painting and moving image the spectator is required to make a commitment of time so that the deeper resonances of the work might become apparent.
Beyond the common artistry that unites painters and those creating moving image installations, further homologies can be found in the structuring of spectatorship around a fixed point of view in front of the image, an operational bequest from classical realist painting.4 This spectatorial anchorage assumes a universal subject and envelops the beholder in the logic of the illusionistic space depicted, organised by the rules of perspective, and provides an ideal, if not entirely stable, vantage point from where the viewer might seek to decipher the work’s meaning. A. L. Rees has observed that although single-point perspective was dismantled by Cubist painters in the early twentieth century – albeit for a stationary spectator – ‘Renaissance perspective (or some version of it) was directly taken over by the cinema and its apparatus’.5 Once film was re-consecrated as installation in the hallowed spaces of galleries, it often retained its frontal, perspectival roots in spite of forays into the domain of abstraction and the phenomenology of scale that would emphasise the immersive physical experience of the projected image over its representational readings. Melissa Gronlund has described the frontality of the moving image as equivalent to ‘the vertical plane of painting’ in which ‘the view onto the world represented in the picture frame corresponds to the erect human posture’.6 It is worth noting Rees’s postscript that while perspectival, Euclydian space addressing a standing viewer was reinstated in cinema, film also adopted the mimesis of photography. In the 1960s and beyond, experimental, avant-garde film and videomakers attempted to disrupt the verisimilitude of the image and what was regarded as the tyranny of perspectival space through their adventures into abstraction, fragmentation and repetition, a history that will be explored in due course.7 However, the appeal of illusionism proved almost irresistible to artists and pictorial approximations of reality, as well as the construction of imaginary realities, re-occur consistently throughout the history of moving image installation, with the viewer configured as homo erectus, an upright onlooker surveying the simulated three-dimensional scene from a ‘hot spot’ outside the frame.8
As in the discussion of the Stations of the Cross, the ideal viewing position can be applied sequentially to equivalent images in a string of related displays. This has led Briony Fer to propose a midway point between painting and installation in the tradition of the tableau vivant as evoked by Marcel Proust in his 1908–09 essay ‘Bedrooms’. Here the novelist describes a highly cinematic waking dream in which he is walking the streets of Paris at dusk. He peers, enchanted, into a succession of brightly lit windows in which ‘lives are performed … private rituals and intimacies have become only spectacle’.9 A visitor to a moving image installation may experience the same physical detachment from the scene that Proust describes, and share his voyeuristic enjoyment of spying on others’ lives. An arrangement of multiple moving image ‘windows’ provides the browsing spectator with the same momentary attractions as the illuminated casements in Proust’s dream, and later, the shop windows in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1927–40). Such fascination as may be elicited from the viewer in the case of art depends, for Fer, on a work continuing ‘to perform a pictorial function’ and the link to painting via the tableau vivant, rearticulated in the context of moving image remains a robust feature of installed works of art to this day.10
Painting boasts another attribute that touches on this discussion; it embodies an intrinsic spatial dualism in the play between surface and apparent depth. This contradictory reading of surface versus pictorial recession came under scrutiny in the late nineteenth century with the Impressionists, and the Cubists in the twentieth, both of whom dramatised the enigmatic phenomenon of paint on canvas. This led inexorably to the reductio ad absurdum, or the ultimate statement in painting of Kazimir Malevich’s famous Black Square on White Background (1915). Some hundred or so years later, the paradox at the heart of pictorial representation captivated experimental film and videomakers in relation to the moving image, a topic I shall return to in subsequent chapters. For the moment, I wish to reiterate what Richard Wollheim described as the ‘twofold experience’ of painting, the simultaneous perception of reality and illusion which, for Wollheim, is ‘the centre of the understanding, and indeed the appreciation of art’.11 However, the balance of verisimilitude to materialist disruption of functional representation needs to lean in favour of the image for the illusory world represented to be discernible beyond the impasto incidents of the surface. Too much patina and the picture disappears, as is easily demonstrated by steadily approaching a nineteenth-century Impressionist painting, say Monet’s Water Lilly Pond (1899) in the National Gallery, until, up close, all that remains of it are patches of pigmented viscosity, artfully congealed on a canvas surface.
For our purposes, the interest of these Impressionist paintings lies with their invitation to abandon the ideal viewing position and approach the picture. Visitors to painting exhibitions were already accustomed to moving freely among the exhibits, building a personalised narrative of the show, so they would feel no inhibition in electing to read the work at any point along a spectrum of legible mimesis at one end, and up-close surface reality at the other. This manner of reading paintings, the viewer playing up and down the scale of representation according to her movements towards or away from the canvas, prefigures the mobile spectator of installation art. An installation that includes the moving image replays the game of oscillating perceptions inherent to painting, but now in relation to the screen or screens. The ambulatory viewer can examine at close range cinema’s material substrate and distil the filmic image into its constituent, abstract parts: the flitting shards of coloured light that animate the surface of the screen in analogue film and in pre-digital video, the eerily glowing scan lines. There is a crucial technical difference between analogue film and video in that the material secret that is discovered on approaching the film image is revealed as a play of light on the inert surface of the screen. In the case of analogue video, the image is, or should I say ‘was’?, created inside the screen itself and the cathode ray tube behind it. Within an installation, the technical apparatus of film is separate from the image but visible should the viewer choose to turn her head and locate the projector; staring into a monitor she encounters the image-generating machine itself, whose workings largely remain invisible.12 One was left marvelling at the effect of electron beams being rhythmically fired at the phosphor-coated inside surface of the glass screen, the rapid scanning of the alternating ‘fields’ discernable only as a slight pulsation in the image. Where the film screen is unmasked on close examination, the video screen only hints at deeper electronic mysteries. In the digital age, with nose pressed against the display, it is also possible to detect the pixellated armature of the image, hovering over an inactive white screen when projected – flickering just under or embedded in the fabric of the glassy face of an LCD or flat-screen plasma monitor. I will return to this issue of locating the screen in chapter nine, when I discuss expanded cinema, but for the moment, I wish to emphasise the congruence between the process of inspecting a painting and viewing a film in an installation environment. Within an open-plan moving image emplacement, the viewer, no longer restricted to a cinema seat, can choose to approach the screen, plunge into a vortex of abstractions by undertaking a forensic examination of the image or retreat to the ideal viewing position and immerse herself in the filmic illusion. She can also drift between these two perceptual states, exploring the pictorial threshold as she did when contemplating Monet’s Water Lilly Pond on an afternoon spent wandering the venerable halls of the National Gallery.13
THE PROLIFERATION OF PERSPECTIVES: CUBISM
When Cubism erupted on the cusp of the twentieth century, a new aspect of mobility came to light, this time articulated within the spatialised domain of the image itself. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque dismantled the single-point perspective of the High Renaissance and created fractured, unstable images suggesting multiple points of view, cumulative impressions such as might be gathered by an individual circumambulating an object or exploring the topography of a landscape, public building, studio or domestic space. In Picasso’s collage Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper (1913) for instance, flattened partial views of everyday objects are arranged into a graphic, multi-faceted ensemble. Some objects, like the guitar and bottle of brandy, are depicted with great simplicity, conjured out of the sweep of a single line, while others appear as themselves: a scrap of wallpaper, a clipping from a newspaper, stuck directly onto the drawing. By imaginative extension of their incomplete borders, these fragments evoke the whole from which each was torn.14 Within the cubist aesthetic, such glimpses are rendered as two-dimensional, schematic maps of things, people and places, akin to the mental maps of reality we knit together from sequences of observations stored in memory. The eye scanning Picasso’s painting moves from one dislocated representation to the next, the brain seeking to match them to an equivalent set of associations based on experience. The meaning of the piece is constructed from an accretion of such deductions. Implied in these works is a further time and motion equivalence, in this case, between the time taken by the painter to travel around a subject as she builds a portfolio of views and the time required for a gallery-goer to make the same inventory as she scans the resulting work of art. The sense of treading the same path as the author of the piece, of engaging in a similar process of concatenating apperceptions anticipates the call to empathy, connectivity and sociality structuring many installations that we might encounter today.
Not only was cubist iconography portrayed as a mosaic of percepts, fused by the interpretive logic of the brain, but it also came to symbolise the disjointed, alienated experience of modern life, most intensively felt in the fast-paced environment of the industrialised metropolis: the factories, the shopping arcades, the docks, train networks and amusement parks of the machine age. As A. L. Rees has observed, cubist fragmentation ‘replaced visual harmonies with a series of abrupt glances that recall an exchange of looks on the street’.15 Film was thus seen to reflect the cognitive processes involved in vision as well as mirror the fragmentation and destabilisation of sense experience in the modern city, already signalled in cubist painting.16 Where we have seen Eisenstein cite architecture as a model for his own theories of montage, Cubism is widely believed to have made an equal contribution, with its model of meaning articulated in the juxtaposition of disconnected, but thematically linked perspectives.17
At the turn of the century, the proliferation of simultaneous viewpoints in Cubism and the perceptual flux of Impressionism implied a parity of the gaze in which any-man or woman’s cognitive capabilities was equally valid and this took on particular significance in the politicised environment of the 1960s. The authority of the specialist spectator – the Kantian connoisseur of art, the patron and the collector – could be challenged as well as the assumption of their exclusive access to universal human truths. The demotic multiplication of gazes resonated with the egalitarian principles of left-leaning ideologies circulating throughout the twentieth century while the rendering of dynamic locomotion was fast becoming the formal ambition of artists still engaged in easel art.
FUTURISM AND ITS LEGACY
The Italian Futurists in the 1910s and 1920s with their frenetic depictions of movement showed the first signs of artists straining to break out of the frame of painting and simultaneously expressed the desire to engage the viewer viscerally in the work; as Ardengo Soffici wrote in 1910, ‘the spectator [must] live at the centre of the painted action’.18 With an unusual touch of humour in an otherwise proto-fascist ideology, the futurist artist Giacomo Balla rendered a dachshund’s legs as a vortex of movements like a canine Catherine wheel in his famous painting Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912). This depiction of overlapping, arrested stages of movement not only referenced the earlier experiments in motion photography conducted by Eadweard Muybridge – his consecutive images taken in rapid succession by multiple cameras led to the invention of film – but also anticipated the tracer effect that became a staple feature of analogue video editing in the 1980s.19 The revelation of the anatomy of movement also signals a fascination with unseen natural processes in the landscape that artists of the moving image have shared with scientists ever since the invention of film. This desire to witness the ‘breath of nature’20 is evident in time-lapse works by artists such as William Raban, Chris Welsby and, more recently, Inge Lise Hansen, Emily Richardson and Semiconductor.21
The atomisation of perception mirroring the frenetic environment of the modern metropolis, and evoking what Karl Krauss called the distracting ‘melody of life’,22 resurfaced within installation art, particularly in multi-media, multi-screen digital and interactive works that, in their celebration of an expanded field of connectivity, now recreate the ‘information bombs’ of the twenty-first century.23 This engagement with the culture of mediatised spectacle found its most radical expression in the pirating and re-processing of mainstream media imagery, predominantly television footage, which began in the early 1980s with the American Dara Birnbaum’s purloined clips of the 1979 Winter Olympics, Wonder Woman and Kojak, that in turn sparked an explosion of ‘scratch video’ in the UK.24 Although many of these early works were single-screen videos, they were soon expanded across multiple monitors and, by 2008, Jeffrey Shaw, Neil Brown, Dennis Del Favero and Peter Weibel had refined the art of appropriation in their immersive T_Visionarium, an enveloping circular screen on which they displayed a database of some 20,000 televisual clips. These quotations from the mainstream orbit the viewer in garlanded layers, conjured up from the depth of digital space by an omnipotent viewer. Jill Bennett explains the technical interactivity of T_Visionarium: ‘Using a special interface the viewer can select, re-arrange and link these video clips at will, composing them into combinations based on relations of gesture and movement’.25 Although the work affords no opportunity to change the information being summoned into view, it does create a three-dimensional equivalent of the quotidian bombardment of competing online attractions. It also evokes the increasingly screen-invaded environment that greets us when we venture outdoors, most of us nowadays voluntarily carrying hand-held devices so that the umbilical cord linking us to cyberspace at home is never broken. Where the Cubists conjured the world of ‘lorries, apprentices, nuns; life on the street, crates in front of the grocer’s; oranges, tomatoes, cabbages’,26 the newly mechanised bustle of the modern industrial world, I would suggest that contemporary artists like Shaw testify to our dimmed awareness of everyday life. We have become disconnected from those with whom we share the city as we increasingly renounce our immediate environment in favour of a portable gateway to our digital universe. Paradoxically, it is perhaps in a moving image installation that we may re-imagine the space we occupy relative to others, and reconsider the medium that has become as essential to our survival as oxygen, as a separate cultural and technological entity.
Neil Brown, Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw, Peter Weibel, T_Visionarium (2008). Courtesy of Jeffrey Shaw.
FROM EARLY RENAISSANCE TO THE TWENTY−FIRST CENTURY
The video artist Bill Viola reaches further back into art history for inspiration, beginning with Giotto di Bondone’s magisterial cycle of frescos depicting the life of St. Francis of Assisi, created sometime in the early 1300s.27 Giotto is celebrated by Heinrich Wölfflin as the great innovator who ‘loosened the tongue of art’.28 In his paintings, Giotto attempted to capture ‘the whole range of human life’ through the retelling of biblical stories and the lives of saints in solidly earthly terms. These were instructional paintings designed to educate a largely illiterate population in the teachings of the Christian church. Being narratives, the frescos are necessarily sequential, grouped in threes, and like the Stations of the Cross discussed in chapter one, they depend on an ambulatory congregation, whose members read the panels in a specified order as they trail around the perimeter of the church. As a pre-cinematic work, the ensemble of Giotto’s panels combines a frame-by-frame narrative with the simultaneous depiction of several events within individual panels – the saint renouncing his worldly goods, Francis appearing to the sleeping pontiff, the miracle of the spring. The buildings Saint Francis inhabits are frequently cut away like partially constructed stage sets and reveal the human drama within. What impresses Viola is the cumulative effect of the panels, ‘the totality of the work’.29 Describing it almost as he might an installation of his own work, Viola continues: ‘you get absorbed in each of these panels, but the piece is the entire space in which you are surrounded by images’.30 Viola takes up the theme of Renaissance painting’s anticipation of video and installation in his discussion of The Dream of Pope Sergius (c. 1430), a single-panel work by Rogier van der Weyden, which also contains diverse events that seem to be occurring concurrently. The Pope is seen in his bedchamber asleep and, within the same pictorial space, at various stages on a journey he is compelled to make at the behest of an angel, seen hovering at his bedside. Viola remarks that Sergius appears to have the power to be in several places at once and that the presence of the angel creates ‘fluidity between [waking space] and dream space, between the inner world and the outer world’; the painting demonstrates that ‘the dividing line between the two is very porous, very transparent’.31
Bill Viola, The Quintet of the Astonished (2000). Colour video rear projection on screen mounted on wall in dark room. Projected image size: 4 ft 7 in x 7 ft 10 in (1.4 x 2.4 m); room dimensions variable, 15:20 min. Performers: John Malpede, Weba Garretson, Tom Fitzpatrick, John Fleck, Dan Gerrity. Photo: Kira Perov. Courtesy of the artist.
Andrew Graham-Dixon identifies in Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1494–98) a similar coexistence of the physical world and Viola’s immaterial realm of feeling, this time revolving around the emotional charge sparked by a single event – Christ’s prophesy that ‘Before the cock crows you will deny me three times’ (Matthew 26: 24). According to Graham-Dixon, Leonardo interprets the impact of Jesus’s announcement as a temporal, almost cinematic event, akin to a stone being dropped in a pool, with the artist ‘recording the emotional ripples panning out’ as a series of reaction shots on the faces of each apostle.32 Their simultaneously occurring gamut of responses become, as Graham-Dixon suggests, ‘part of a single current of feeling’, made up of ‘several moments laid out as if they were one’.33 The viewer, whose eye is drawn by the gravitational pull of successive faces, provides the continuity of those moments as she mentally edits together the facial expressions into an enrichment of a story that for most visitors to Santa Maria della Grazie is already part of their shared repository of sacred narratives.
Whether in the church at Assisi or the convent refectory in Milan where The Last Supper commands the space, the oscillation between different states of consciousness, the cognitive dissonance between what is conjured by the image and what can be externally perceived is a condition of viewing that reoccurs in Viola’s own work and within moving image installation in general. We will return to this theme, but for the moment, I will note that in moving image installation, as in a fresco cycle, the spectator drifts between conditions of imaginative transport to a frame-captured illusory elsewhere, and a physical engagement with the spaces in between screens through which she moves, where other materials and individuals may be encountered. At the same time, as she progresses from concentrations of screen-based interest to the next attraction, she develops and maintains an embodied spatial awareness of the architectural envelope in which the work as a whole is contained. The spectator synthesises an accumulation of haptic and spatial information with the successive impressions of each image station, as well as material incidents in between, and constructs an interpretation of the work that is acceptable to the rational mind.
The continuity between Quattrocento painting and moving image installation has been consistently reiterated in the work of artists in recent decades, but most energetically by Viola, a pioneer of American video art. In his 2001 Passion Series, he forensically examines the synchronous eruption of emotion upon the physiognomies of individuals, triggered by a single distressing, but unexplained off-screen event. Emulating the suspended animation, the stasis of Leonardo’s distressed disciples, Viola presents actors in groups or individually in extreme slow motion going through the facial and bodily contortions that denote profound grief. Here, the digital counterparts of Leonardo’s traumatised figures are subjected to what Eivind Røssak called ‘techniques of delay’,34 and redeployed across a number of screens, suspended in their own time bubbles. Like the protagonists in Giotto’s fresco cycle, however, and in common with many video installations in the 1990s and early 2000s, the individual screens embody different conditions of the same psyche (the figures are largely interchangeable) or stages in the progress of a unified story whether narrative, cryptic or formal in nature. In Viola’s Catherine’s Room (2001), for instance, an episodic work that charts the span of a woman’s life through successive views of her somewhat Spartan bedroom, the continuity between fresco painting of the early Renaissance as exemplified by the life of St. Francis and moving image installation in our own era becomes increasingly apparent. In both, the images disposed around an enclosed space can be viewed simultaneously, at a glance, as an effect of the entire work married to its housing. They can also be consumed serially, the frescos or videos examined one after the other, the viewer moving in and out of the imaginative world depicted on canvas, on plaster or onscreen, with the mental picture of the whole being incrementally constructed from its separate elements, over time. As discussed in the previous chapter, whether manifesting as multiple screen events in the case of Catherine’s Room or sequential static images in Giotto’s fresco cycle, the installation of these works, separated by several centuries in time but by very little human evolution, are both dependent on the disposition of the architectural environment. The gallery or church will have been designed to lead the visitor through a proscribed route and, in so doing, communicate the narratives that the artists wished to convey. As John Walsh has remarked, even the zigzagging arrangement of the architecture depicted in van der Weiden’s painting serves to lead the eye and the mind to a determined reading of the legend of Pope Sergius. The space, he says, ‘is shaped to make it happen’.35
Bill Viola, Catherine’s Room (2001). Colour video polyptych on five LCD flat panels mounted on wall 15 x 97 x 2 1/4 in., (38.1 x 246.4 x 5.7 cm), 18:00 min. Performer: Weba Garretson. Photo: Kira Perov. Courtesy of the artist.
WORRYING THE EDGES OF THE FRAME: THE RUPTURE
We might disagree with Donald Judd who, writing in 1966, declared that in painting, ‘the elements inside the rectangle are broad and simple and correspond closely to the rectangle. The shapes and surface are only those that can occur plausibly within and on a rectangular plane’.36 The space outside the frame was already implied in the figurative gestures of classical painting, like the bare-breasted Liberty in Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) who holds aloft the French flag and inspires the revolutionary rabble behind her, suggested by the few figures that are immediately visible. By extension, she also reaches out from the painting seeking to galvanise those surveying her in the gallery. The frame is traversed in the glance that soars to a distant horizon beyond the spectator, like David’s contemplating his prospects having slain Goliath in Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath (c. 1607). We might also point to the device, influenced by photography, of using the frame to elide sections of figures in Impressionist painting, at the same time implying the whole. This inference of forms stretching beyond the frame, could also be found, as suggested above, in the part-objects of cubist collages and the evocations of speed in futurist painting earlier in the century – ‘motion paintings’ that seemed about to jump from the frame.
As the twentieth century progressed, the placing of a frame around a picture seemed more and more incidental if not entirely arbitrary. Later in the century, painting substituted the expansion of pictorial space predicated on depth perception within realism to a two-dimensional, lateral augmentation of space creating a kind of graphic limitlessness in the frantic, knotted abstractions of Jackson Pollock in the 1950s or the cool repeat patterns of Bridget Riley in the 1960s. In a 1958 ArtNews article entitled ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’, Allan Kaprow commented on the monumental size of Pollock’s canvases and concluded that ‘they ceased to become paintings and became environments’. Not only was the size of the work pushing it into the realms of installation but the homogeneity of the abstract mark-making in these ‘action paintings’ threatened to render the frame redundant. The boundary of the picture could, in theory, be placed anywhere, since one could imagine the pattern infinitely repeating, and expanding exponentially linking one canvas to another. This recast each painting as a single frame in an intervallic continuum – like the frames of analogue film divided by moments of blackness that dissolve once the film is in motion.
Although the discussion so far has emphasised the continuities between painting and moving image installation, there was a historical moment of rupture in which the limitations of painting were held to be inhibiting the progress of modernity in the arts. By the turn of the twentieth century, some painters were becoming frustrated with the inability of the plastic arts to depict what Walter Ruttmann described as ‘the tempo of our times’.37 He advocated the rejection of easel painting and the wholesale adoption of the moving image. The new ‘medium of time’ now fell in step with modern viewers who, as Ruttmann observed, were ‘increasingly forced to consider events in time’ and could no longer ‘tackle the rigid, reduced timeless forms of painting’.38
André Bazin, writing in the 1950s, was concerned to draw attention to the spatial benefits of the moving image as well as the temporal when he made a distinction between the stasis of the self-contained space of the canvas and the dynamic, unfolding territories of film. He observed that the frame of a painting is what he termed ‘centripetal’ and delimits the internal space of the image, whereas the frame of film is ‘centrifugal’, the edges showing ‘only a portion of reality’; space in film therefore ‘seems to be part of something prolonged indefinitely into the universe’, always moving out into a space beyond the frame, a process that Bazin describes as ‘boundless’.39 Although, as argued above, there were painters like Pollock whose work might qualify as centrifugal, there was no contest with the dynamic motion in film. Centrifugal, abstract pictorial space had already made the transition from the canvas to celluloid in works by pioneers of abstract film such as Oskar Fischinger in the 1920s and Len Lye and Mary Ellen Bute in the 1930s. As in the work of the Abstract Expressionists later in the century, the depiction of depth gave way to a celebration of optical flux in a flattened picture plane. The film frame became the stage set for the interplay between the dramatis personae of line, form, texture, colour, rhythm and time rushing through the field of vision into the space of the imagination.
Dynamic motion was achieved in classic cinema when the camera itself moved or an animated scene flowed past the stationary lens. The later development of rapid-fire editing upped the pace, and together these undeniable assets explain Bazin’s nomination of spatial expansiveness in film as its major contribution to modernity. However, Stephen Heath added a proviso by emphasising the imaginative journey undertaken by the viewer in cinema; as he argues, ‘what moves, finally, is the spectator, immobile in front of the screen’ and, he adds, ‘film is the regulation of that movement’.40
Whether playing to a seated audience or, later, to a mobile spectator, the moving image was seen to displace the dinosaur of painting, and was anointed as the flagship innovation in an age of rapid industrial and scientific progress. It was characterised as the embodiment of the fragmented experience of contemporary city life but also deemed consonant with the new mobility enjoyed by the modern traveller, surveying the unfolding landscape through the frame of the car or railway carriage window. The contemporary tourist reached untold horizons later in the twentieth century through commercial air travel and the lucky few finally broke out of the global frame altogether and launched into outer space, with the moving image as their travelling companion.41
THE LEGACY OF PAINTING
Moving image installations in the last fifty years have constantly reiterated regimes of representation derived from painting, taking inspiration from Giotto in the High Renaissance, the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock as well as the colour fields of Kenneth Noland and the Op Art mesmerism of Bridget Riley. The preoccupation with frames and framing can be found in the work of early video artists in the 1960s and 1970s such as David Hall, Tamara Krikorian and Tom Sherman and later filmmakers like Patrick Keiller and Francis Alÿs. These artists render in cinematic terms the philosopher Heraclitus’s notion of an impermanent world in a state of constant flux, as they reveal life passing through the fixed frame of a locked off, static camera, which itself replicates the permeable borders of painting. Bruce Nauman’s Stamping the Studio (1967–68) is exemplary in this respect. The work is a real-time record of the artist’s restless pacing around his studio. Adopting a format later taken up by Samuel Beckett in Quad (BBC Television, 1982), Nauman, shot from above, traces a path that follows exactly the boundary of the physical space he is patrolling, itself visually equivalent to the frame and the monitor on which the work was originally displayed – a paced-out frame within a frame within a frame.
We have already established that groups of paintings, in the form of frescoes, tableaux vivants, trompe l’oeil architectural features and devotional Stations of the Cross, in their spatialised and thematic connectivity, activate the space between frames, both actual and imagined, as much as they coalesce concentrations of meaning within their provisional borders. In these groupings, they inscribe a perambulating spectator whose experience of the work will be built from a combination of contemplative interludes before individual images and an accumulating sense of the whole derived from locomotion. In the last century, there can be found any number of precedents in which painters choose to display work in the form of installations, for the benefit of mobile spectators; for instance, Frida Kahlo’s La Casa Azul in Mexico City, the house that was, until her death in 1954, as much an installation of her work as it was a living space. Wrapped in a cobalt blue exterior, the house embeds her paintings in the context of her life and, like Barbara Hepworth’s home in St. Ives, emphasises creativity as process. The business of making and thinking are evident not only in the tools of Kahlo’s trade, left as they were found after her death, but in her gardens, her photographs and letters and the Mexican, pre-Hispanic art that she collected with her husband Diego Rivera. This aspiration to a domestic Gesamtkunstwerk is also discernible in the work of the contemporary Cuban artist José Fuster, who declared that he wished to live ‘within the art’ he makes in such profusion. Using the proceeds from the international sale of his paintings and ceramics, Fuster is gradually encrusting not only his own house with his flamboyant, Gaudi- and Picasso-influenced mosaics but also those of his neighbours in Jaimanitas, a suburb of Havana. Every available surface now features colourful murals depicting the flora and fauna of the island as well as local musicians, fishermen, mermaids and Santería saints. A better-known example would be Mark Rothko’s 1959 Seagram paintings, now housed at Tate Modern in London. Rothko also regarded his paintings as murals, displays that would, as Jonathan Jones observed, ‘shape an experience of space through art’.42 The monumentality of the canvases creates an integrated environment in which Rothko’s dour, apocalyptic visions in oceanic browns and maroons engage in a kind of synchronised visual chorus that, albeit in a different key, resurfaces in moving image installations by artists from Bill Viola to Shirin Neshat, from Robert Cahen to Manon de Boer. The pictorial traditions of painting; the articulations of space within and beyond the frame, the play of surface and depth, the address to a grazing spectator, the stylistic range from realism to the most sublime of abstractions, from prettiness to the embrace of the abject, will all resurface in myriad guises throughout this discussion of installation and the moving image. The new dynamic, animated form of installed pictures does not so much cannibalise the history of painting as rediscover its potential in the context of new technologies and new audiences already predisposed to the apprehension of serialised, enframed visual representations – taken on the hoof.
José Fuster, mosaic wall works (2008), Jaimanitas district, Havana, Cuba. Photo: Uwe Ackermann.
NOTES
1 Barry Schwabsky (2001) ‘Shirley Wiitasalo: The Ineffability Effect’, catalogue essay, Power Plant, Toronto, p. 11.
3 See Briony Fer (2001) ‘The Somnambulist’s Story: Installation and the Tableau’, Oxford Art Journal, special issue ‘On Installation’, 24: 2, pp. 75–93.
4 I am aware of those forms of painting that inscribe an ambulatory spectator such as frescos, which I discuss in due course, and the Stations of the Cross referenced in chapter one.
5 A. L. Rees; email correspondence with the author, 9 July 2006.
6 See Melissa Gronlund (2012) ‘Observational Film: Administration of Social Reality’, MIRAJ, 1:2, p. 173.
8 For a discussion of cinematic illusionism and anti-illusionism, see Jonathan Walley (2014) ‘Experimental cinema’s illusive illusion’, MIRAJ, 2: 2, pp. 239–50.
9 Marcel Proust quoted in Briony Fer (2001), op. cit., p. 77.
11 Richard Wollheim quoted in Grahame Weinbren (2012) ‘Coloured paper in monument valley: contradictions, resonances, and pluralities in the art of Pat O’Neill’, MIRAJ, 1: 2, p. 159.
12 The external paraphernalia of a monitor is often on display – the tangle of wires, multi-plugs and mixers – but its internal workings remain veiled.
13 I am not suggesting that this spectator-led play between surface and depth makes a viewer inherently more ‘active’. In fact, few adults go up to the screen and watch the dots the way children do. My interest is in the structural equivalence between Impressionist painting and projected film that would allow for such an investigation.
14 This expansion of volume by inference could well be read as an equivalent of off-screen space, a theme I shall return to later in this chapter and again in chapter nine.
15 A. L. Rees (2000) A History of Experimental Film and Video. London: British Film Institute, p. 23. Rees also credits the Cubists for inspiring the development of Russian revolutionary film, with its sudden changes of view (jump cuts) and mobile camera.
16 See, for instance, Miriam Hansen (2012) Cinema and Experience;Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
17 The pioneering film director D. W. Griffith was influenced by the way Charles Dickens broke up a story, ‘shifting from one group of people to another’, and this ‘nearness to the characteristics of cinema in [the] methods’ of parallel storytelling, according to Eisenstein, was another powerful source for the development of montage. See Sergei Eisenstein (1944) Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today. Available online: http://filmadaptation.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2012/08/Eisenstein-Dickens-Griffith-and-the-Film-Today.pdf (accessed 30 September 2014).
18 Ardengo Soffici quoted by RoseLee Goldberg (1979) Performance: Live Art from 1909 to the Present. London: Thames & Hudson, p. 10.
19 Another antecedent for the tracer effect can be found in the multiple exposures of the ‘chronophotographer’ Etienne Jules Marey (1830–1904).
21 For an insightful account of Semiconductor’s works see Lilly Husbands (2013) ‘The metaphysics of data: Philosophical science in Semiconductor’s animated videos’, MIRAJ, 2: 2, pp. 198–212. Recent years have also witnessed an explosion of time-lapse filmmaking in galleries and online.
22 Karl Krauss in his 1910 essay ‘Heine and the Consequences’, quoted in Jonathan Fanzen (2013) ‘Rage against the machine’, Guardian Review, 14 September, p. 2.
23 A term Tom Sherman uses throughout Before and after the I-Bomb: An Artist in the Information Environment. Atlanta: The Banff Centre Press (2002).
24 See Catherine Elwes (2005) Video Art: A Guided Tour. London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 96–116. I will return to this topic in chapter eleven.
26 Heinrich Böll ([1961] 2011) Billiards at Half Past Nine, trans. Patrick Bowles. London: Maryon Boyars, p. 6.
27 There is some dispute among scholars as to the accuracy of the attribution to Giotto, but this need not detain us here.
28 Heinrich Wolfflin ([1952] 1968) Classic Art, trans. Peter and Linda Murray. London: Phaidon, p. 3.
29 Bill Viola (2003) in conversation with John Walsh, The Eye of the Heart (Mark Kidel, director), BBC 4.
34 See Eivind Røssak (2011) ‘The Still/Moving Field: An Introduction’, in Eivind Røssak (ed.) Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 11–26.
35 John Walsh, director of the Paul Getty Museum (retired 2000), in conversation with Bill Viola, as above.
36 Donald Judd quoted by Michael Fried ([1967] 1998) Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
37 Walter Ruttmann (c. 1919/1920, 1989) ‘Malerei mit Zeit’, in Jeanpaul Goergen (ed.) Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Berlin:Freunde der deutschen Kinemathek, p. 74.
39 André Bazin ([1959] 1968) ‘Painting and Cinema’, in What is Cinema: Volume One, trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, p. 164.
41 Who can forget the footage of those first ungainly steps taken by astronauts in 1969, beamed to our earthly television sets?