presence & presentness

The question keeps arising if I’m performing in the work and what is the difference between enacting them live, as I have been in crit situations and then representing the documentation – as shown in this blog. It seems to be working somewhere in between as I’m not performing ‘live’ and then presenting the documentation (evidence of an action) rather the work is performed as it is recorded and rescreened. By not insisting the action be seen live, I’m interested in how the resulting evidence of action can make the viewer contemplate the series of events that have lead to that conclusion. Maybe this is a possible way of making it live, without necessarily being present.

There is also the importance of it occurring within a specific site, or situation and its relation to the audience, for example there is a difference between inviting an audience to observe something which I am presenting to them and then having them witness me enacting (performing) the actual situation itself. Say showing previous work in a crit vs. performing the crit itself.

A friend commented its like seeing the performance of the performance, something to do with the difference between performance and performativity. This is often bought up in relation to the ontology of performance; if the ‘performance utterance’ of J L Austin addressing language can be transposed to performance and performance theory. In investigating the pragmatics of language it is possible in saying something, to be actually doing something, rather than simply reporting or describing it. For Derrida the performative enacts the now of writing in the present time- perhaps so if this can be applied to the pragmatics of performance, by imbuing the performance in its actual situation so that one ends up enacting the activity that the representation signifies rather than describing and presenting it.

Peggy Phelan in Unmarked the Politics of Performance suggests that performance can only exist in the present, and its inability to be reproduced or repeated.

‘Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representation, once it does so, it becomes something other than performance… It can be performed again, but this repetition itself marks it as ‘different’. The document of a performance only a spur to memory, an encouragement of memory to become present.’

I am interested in how this can be sit alongside philosophy which opens up notions of temporal continuity such as that posited by Henri Bergson. The documentation of a performance serves only to spur memory, the moment of its existence is in the past, yet if we consider Bergson’s temporal paradox of the past (through memory) informing perception of the present, there is an opportunity for past documentation not only to contribute to present perception but also to exist in the moment of reception. I am interested in developing work that emphasises the presentness of performance yet through the means of recording and documenting the work for assumed re-presentation.

reality of projection

Plato in The Republic addresses art as imitation or as mimesis. He critiques representation as a pretense to actually experiencing the real. The artist differs to the craftsman as he seeks to copy the Form (with a capital F), that is he copies the copy rather than creating something which is real. Hence art represents the appearance of appearances; a way tomake things appear rather that make them as they truly are. His philosophy suggests thatart appears different without being so; the image is removed from the truth and hence is inferior.

I am interested in emphasising art as being an enactment of the real,a re-presentation, yet I consider this presentation to be considered as something new in itself. Rather than critiquing image as merely an illusion, a projection of a higher reality, I feel it is more beneficial to call attention to the very nature of mediation;a reflection on mediation itself. This couldbe aligned with the simulacra and Baudrillard’s notion of the hyperreal yet I feel my interest lies more in theprocess of appearing itself as opposed to naming and categorising the outcome. The means and mediation of 'difference' itself I suppose, if I want to bring Deleuze into it.

Still on the other hand I do feel that I am not trying to prove or overlay the projected image as reality, rather I see it as an attempt to imbue the work strongly within its own situation, (working in the studio, documenting and presenting work etc) so that it becomes difficult to distinguish work from requirement, representation from the real.

Emphasising the experience of the moment itself by presenting it as representation but then allowing it to fall out again.

I’m not sure it fits in but I am also intrigued by Schopenhauer’s philosophy of aesthetics in The World as Will and Representation particularly ‘das delo’ or the systematic ordering of how things present themselves in an illusional way. That is the world as we encounter it does not exist rather it occurs as the way we order and systematise it in relation to sufficient reason. This harps back to my thinking at the beginning of the project- of making a viewer come to understand the pre-established way in which they approach representation. Schopenhauer suggests it is through the infinite that we can enter domains outside of space and time and experience reality as it truly is. He cynically suggests it is through total absorption into the world of representation that prevents suffering as it diverts the spectators attention form to grave everyday world and lifts it to a world that consists of the folly of a mere play of images.

layering (after paintover)

The layers within the works are always manually constructed by projecting footage on top of itself and refilming. They are mostly done in consecutive order, only an hour or so apart, but I am interested in potentially emphasising the gap between layers, be it a different day, activity, duration etc. While importing some of this footage I was thinking about Alvin Lucier's piece I am Sitting in a Room, particularly the degradation of layers as it goes through the manual process of retransmission (visual in my case, audio in his). As it projects over itself the work begins to erase itself with the first layer becoming almost non-existent. I also found it amusing, in the attempt to paint out a screen I start to paint over the previous layer which through the white paint actually exposes the previous layer more, a bit of an oxymoron really. Also reminiscent of Lucier, the work becomes dictated by the limitations of the site is it in- I could only play back three layers before the projector backed into the parameters of the studio.

Up to date I've been working with the layers being transposed on top of each other but I am beginning to consider whether it is possible to expand horizontally rather than extending forwards. By using multiple projectors rather than a single fixed channel and allowing these to run different footage (or perhaps the same footage) at different durations resulting in the interaction between the layers happening within the projected install itself, rather than happening within the film. As the layers respond and react to each other, syncing up and falling out again there is a potential for the work to have a 'live' dialogue with itself.

station drag

Screened as part of Intransit at the Wellington St Bus Station in Perth. Here I aligned the camera to a projected image of the station both of which I clumsily drag around a nondescript space. Like studio drag I’m deliberately exposing the struggle of composing the work, in fact harping it up to a certain degree. For the project I was working towards the projection being viewed life-size so there would be the potential for a passing glance to misinterpret the projected action as actually being in the site, yet as the install shots show the work was scaled down to a video type format. Not that significant yet it brings up the relevance of the scale and situation of the work, how much control I can have over this and if not if the work can stand on its on as a video rather than an installation.

install shots by Daniel Grant

interlaced video & the glitch

As a consequence of my slowing developing video skills a number of my works to date have exhibited glitches and/or interlaced footage. I’m hesitant to pass this one off as a ‘charged moment’, of revealing its own construction, as it is a (common) production fluke, rather than a physical manipulation, such as knocking the camera, but still it is interesting in consideration of the project. The glitchs have come as accidents, mostly through using the schools tape decks that have run hundreds of various tapes through them, unlike the work of Daniel Crooks who has devised a way to manipulate video to mimic the glitch. Yet it is interesting to consider they display a past and previous moment simultaneously. Interlacing or the combing effect viewed when the two fields that normally combine to create one frame do not meet up is perhaps a too literal and instantaneous translation of a temporal paradox I’ve been trying to create, but still worth consideration.

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medium & mediation

Perhaps a recap is necessary at this point of the project to date. Being rather broad I am looking at the nature, means and processes of representation but more specifically I am attempting to use projection as a medium and re-enactment as a way of creating and emphasising mediation, merging process and reception. This lingo medium and mediation has stemmed from the previously mentioned article on the work of Andrei Tarkovsky by Robert Bird. As with Krauss arose an expanded definition of medium, to include an intervening substance (or potentially person) of communication as well as the obvious connotations of material, with Bird’s article the definition of mediation has expanded to refer to not only the space between but also the materiality of this gap. The technical process of how something can come about. The very means of which allows us to transmit an articulation or representation of …well whatever it is we wish to get across. In terms of my thinking medium has come to refer to the means of production, while mediation refers to the materiality of the in-between process, between production and reception. By refusing to act as representation of a defined subject the work rather re-presents only the possibility of representation (how many times can I put that word in a sentence). What I am trying to get at is in its avoidance of subject or mimesis the work alludes to its own material construction as medium. Bird phrases it as ‘affirming the materiality of its mediation.‘ Rather than working with content, (for example re-presenting the close-as-it-can-be-to-real imitation,) the work allows for the confrontation of the corporeal of the very medium of its own representation. This undoubtedly has been affirmed in Modernism’s self-referentiality, with the stock standard example of Vertov’s Man with Movie Camera which uses its own medium to reveal the nature of its medium, but I still feel there is something to drive forward in all this.

The project to date

• Conflating the past (footage, notes & diagrams) with the present moment (mirroring, live performance, live feedback). Creating a spatial and temporal paradox or a collapsed present through layering site and duration.
• Relation of production, representation and reception, focusing on the documentation & re-presentation of a time based practice.
• Aligning through synchrony and proximity. Creating a conflation between my real self and former recorded self. a real situation and a past situation.
• Content- the search for content becomes content itself through re-enacting own actions in making, documenting and presenting the work. Attempt to understand and demonstrate the feedback loops I am placing myself within.
• Charged moment- a moment where the work lapses to reveal itself as a construction. Falls apart to reveal itself hopefully in order to question what is conceived as real and what is representation.