More and more this work seems to take on characteristics of site specific art. Layering animation onto footage of an interview is like installing an artwork into a real locus: it's a space already heavily invested in meaning that the animation plays upon. Particularly I like the concepts of the 'host' and 'ghost' in site specific art, where the context/place hosts the artwork creating a dynamic/ephemeral relationship.
This point of view realised through reading:
Palimpsest or Potential Space? Finding a Vocabulary for Site-Specific Performance
By Cathy Turner
Cambridge Journals, November 2004
Saturday, June 2, 2012
The Politics of the Gaze: Foucault, Lacan and Žižek
The Politics of the Gaze: Foucault, Lacan and Žižek
By Henry Krips
Culture Unbound, Volume
2, 2010: 91–102.
Cannot upload the article here but have extracted relevant quotes and my thoughts on them below.
“That which is gaze is always a play of light and opacity. It is always that gleam of light…which prevents me, at each point, from being a screen”. The gaze, Lacan then adds, “is presented to us only in the form of a strange contingency, symbolic of...the lack that constitutes castration anxiety…It surprises [the viewer]…disturbs him and reduces him to a feeling of shame” (Lacan 1981: 96, 72–73, 84).
The camera is a form of the gaze,
"...the subject is brought to recognize that there is a hole, a lack, in his visual field – a something that, because it is present but cannot be seen, functions as a point of failure of the visual field... a point of indeterminacy in the visual field, where the subject fails to see."
The camera is like a vortex into which sound, light and time get sucked, and we don't know how it frames us, only that it frames us... putting us in a place of forced submission.
"In short, resistance becomes a sham – even where it exists, it is taken into account in advance; indeed, merely serves to incite new and more subtle processes of oppression."
I feel that the editing process is again a source of oppression, twisting the truth into sub-truths, half-truths, lies.
“...the images presented on the screen are accepted by the subject as its own …the image seems…to perfectly represent the subject” (Copjec 1994: 21, 23).
This point is what post-documentary theory hinges on, from my understanding.
“The [voyeuristic] pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand, the [exhibitionistic pleasure] that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it…These attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries not to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure” (Foucault 1990: 45)
It became clear in the interviewing process that both interviewer and interviewee were in the presence of a gaze (the camera) for which both of us constructed a version of ourselves. Like any game it was both exciting to be playing but the idea of 'losing' (I suppose in this context losing would be to acknowledge that there was any kind of game).
Friday, June 1, 2012
Shelly Silver
Had seen this work a few weeks ago, forgotten the name of the artist and just found it again.
She does a similar thing but with photography and strangers (not video and friends). Post-documentary theory comes into her work as well through her openly subjective editing techniques and especially her commentary about her experiences. Her's is a more open ended project...
This is only a segment of the whole work, titled "What I'm Looking For":
http://vimeo.com/38698139
She does a similar thing but with photography and strangers (not video and friends). Post-documentary theory comes into her work as well through her openly subjective editing techniques and especially her commentary about her experiences. Her's is a more open ended project...
This is only a segment of the whole work, titled "What I'm Looking For":
http://vimeo.com/38698139
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Ryan Trecartin
I'm a big fan of Ryan Trecartin. In this interview he likens the editing process to more traditional media and describes it as painting with footage. I'm nearly finished with editing my footage, it has been unexpected how much traditional processes used in painting such as framing and glazing are present in this work.
I feel an affinity with Trecartin's description of editing, it's like painting back over a primed surface and layering imagery to develop a meaningful image.
Other works of his I have looked at which play with pictorial traditions:
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Post-documentary theory
Difficult to find articles about post-documentary theory. Even on UNSW library catalogue could not find any print sources. These are a few I found on the internet. My comments beneath relevant quotes.
Representation through Documentary: A Post-Modern Assessment
Krystin Arneson
Mar 30th, 2012
Critical Theory, Culture, Issue 6
http://cwp.missouri.edu/artifacts/?p=270
'Despite their presentation, documentaries are not an objective but a subjective device, a medium that “marshal[s] systems of representation to encourage point of view about something”[3] This inherent subjectivity, drawn not only from the construction of the film but also from the interpretation of the filmmaker, makes it impossible for a documentary to ever accurately represent the everyday.'
Interviews are infected with the subjectivity of the interviewer because the process of questioning that guides the conversation in the direction of the person giving the interview. Images are framed i.e. images are reductive of environments. Editing is then a further abstraction away from an objective representation... quotes are selected, other parts of discussion are excluded and a voice is constructed instead of simply just presented to be heard.
Traces Of The Real: Photographs of songs and other things
Martha Rosler
http://tracesofthereal.com/2009/11/29/post-documentary-post-photography-martha-rosler-2001/
This article is about photography, but important and relevant because it discusses aesthetic. Developing a meaningful aesthetic that acknowledges the short-comings of documentary artworks
'The role of the documentarian as the privileged outsider shedding light on those underprivileged communities fortunate to benefit from the attention of his/her lens is no longer tenable. At the same time, the idea that marginalised communities should document their own struggles without the interference of “outside” agents is also fraught with difficulty, not least of which is the impossibility of defining what “outside” actually means in many contexts.' I suppose in my work initially the idea of 'outsider' referred to people who are not creative practitioners, and the work was created to redress the modern notion of artist as tortured genius. This has evolved as I now consider the outsider to be everyone who is not a person I have interviewed and myself... therefore communication of an objective truth isn't the aim of the artwork and I feel freer to move towards more abstract representations of the documentation.
'...photography remains a cornerstone of the documentation of events. She argues that this is largely attributable to the context in which the photographs are presented. For example, if they are presented as part of a report from a reputable media organisation, with associated codes of journalistic practice in place, they are likely to be accepted... These codes of practice are critically important to news photographers as they embody the notions of responsibility towards their viewers, their subjects, and indeed their own profession, that are crucial to the continued viability of their work. A genre of photography that is devoid of such responsbility is street photography, which Rosler criticises for this reason.'
This last quote is relevant because my artwork will be somewhere between documentary and a contemporary video artwork... therefore it falls into a realm with perhaps conflicting codes of practice.
Representation through Documentary: A Post-Modern Assessment
Krystin Arneson
Mar 30th, 2012
Critical Theory, Culture, Issue 6
http://cwp.missouri.edu/artifacts/?p=270
'Despite their presentation, documentaries are not an objective but a subjective device, a medium that “marshal[s] systems of representation to encourage point of view about something”[3] This inherent subjectivity, drawn not only from the construction of the film but also from the interpretation of the filmmaker, makes it impossible for a documentary to ever accurately represent the everyday.'
Interviews are infected with the subjectivity of the interviewer because the process of questioning that guides the conversation in the direction of the person giving the interview. Images are framed i.e. images are reductive of environments. Editing is then a further abstraction away from an objective representation... quotes are selected, other parts of discussion are excluded and a voice is constructed instead of simply just presented to be heard.
Traces Of The Real: Photographs of songs and other things
Martha Rosler
http://tracesofthereal.com/2009/11/29/post-documentary-post-photography-martha-rosler-2001/
This article is about photography, but important and relevant because it discusses aesthetic. Developing a meaningful aesthetic that acknowledges the short-comings of documentary artworks
'The role of the documentarian as the privileged outsider shedding light on those underprivileged communities fortunate to benefit from the attention of his/her lens is no longer tenable. At the same time, the idea that marginalised communities should document their own struggles without the interference of “outside” agents is also fraught with difficulty, not least of which is the impossibility of defining what “outside” actually means in many contexts.' I suppose in my work initially the idea of 'outsider' referred to people who are not creative practitioners, and the work was created to redress the modern notion of artist as tortured genius. This has evolved as I now consider the outsider to be everyone who is not a person I have interviewed and myself... therefore communication of an objective truth isn't the aim of the artwork and I feel freer to move towards more abstract representations of the documentation.
'...photography remains a cornerstone of the documentation of events. She argues that this is largely attributable to the context in which the photographs are presented. For example, if they are presented as part of a report from a reputable media organisation, with associated codes of journalistic practice in place, they are likely to be accepted... These codes of practice are critically important to news photographers as they embody the notions of responsibility towards their viewers, their subjects, and indeed their own profession, that are crucial to the continued viability of their work. A genre of photography that is devoid of such responsbility is street photography, which Rosler criticises for this reason.'
This last quote is relevant because my artwork will be somewhere between documentary and a contemporary video artwork... therefore it falls into a realm with perhaps conflicting codes of practice.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Henry Hills, Emma Bernstein
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Hills-Emmas-Dilemma.html
Amazing amazing amazing amazing documentary pieces. Filmmaker turned "media artist" Henry Hills (creator of ubuweb) edited the interviews young Emma Bee Bernstein (daughter of Charles Bernstein) made with artists and poets of New York.
Communication is completely undermined by editing process. Interesting and engaging, not sure to what extent communication will be withheld in my own editing processes as I'm yet to experiment with my raw footage but there will be a lot of playing around.
Amazing amazing amazing amazing documentary pieces. Filmmaker turned "media artist" Henry Hills (creator of ubuweb) edited the interviews young Emma Bee Bernstein (daughter of Charles Bernstein) made with artists and poets of New York.
Communication is completely undermined by editing process. Interesting and engaging, not sure to what extent communication will be withheld in my own editing processes as I'm yet to experiment with my raw footage but there will be a lot of playing around.
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