Curate 2008
For Visions in the Nunnery 2008, we invited Dr Tracey Warr and Dr Ricarda Vidal who bought to our curatorial programme two interesting and very different selections of work.
Dr Tracey Warr
Dr Tracey Warr is an art writer and independent curator. She is the editor of The Artist’s Body (Phaidon, 2000) and has recently published texts on Art in the Punk Years, London Fieldworks, Marcus Coates and Endurance Art. She is currently DAAD Guest Professor at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. She makes installed text artworks with the Something Like Spit artists’ collective who recently showed at The Exchange Gallery in Penzance, Cornwall http://somethinglikespit.org
The selection of artists’ work for Visions in the Nunnery 2008 covered two thematic strands:
City Choreographies and Viewing Positions.
In CITY CHOREOGRAPHIES artists address human movement around the city. ‘The street is a stage and the sense that an audience is watching pervades the gestures and movements of the players on it’ (William H. White, City, 1989). Many writers including Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Walter Benjamin and Georges Perec have addressed the relationship between the city and its pedestrian inhabitants. ‘To live is to pass from one space to another, while doing your very best not to bump yourself’ (Perec, Species of Spaces, 1974). Richard Sennett described the peculiar power of the city to take apart the intentions of urban design (The Conscience of the Eye, 1990).
Moving image works by Alan Smith, Inger Alfnes, Emma Waltroud Howes, Liam Yeates and Mark Greenwood address the space of the city and human movement within it. Georges Perec’s film from the 1970s, A Scene of A Flight, is based on an autobiographical story of an 11 year old boy who runs away from home in Paris in 1947. The film charts the boy’s negotiations of the city he is lost and covert within.
In the second strand of the programme, VIEWING POSITIONS, artists explore the real life subjective worlds of participants or themselves. Many moving image artists including Phil Collins, Danica Dakic, Mark Raidpere and Artur Zmijewski have recently worked with participants, as opposed to actors or performers, in controversial and perplexing ways. Artists are often walking a fine line between reality and fiction, between ethnography and exploitation. As viewers we are conscious of watching authored versions of participating others. Works by Maya Bekan, Penny Skerrett, Philip Curtis, Rebecca Weeks, Esme Valk and Steven Paige explore the subjective experience of the self and others and the gaze of the artist, camera and audience.
‘I regard curating and writing as in a continuum with artists’ practice as opposed to separated categories from them. I am interested in writing with artists as opposed to about them. I see curating as a two-way process of dialogue in making, rather than simply a selection of finished objects or DJing with the art canon. I have selected work by artists who have either been my collaborators, such as Alan Smith or artists from the Something Like Spit collective, or my students on postgraduate programmes at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam; Dartington College of Arts and Bauhaus-Universität Weimar’ (Tracey Warr).
Dr Ricarda Vidal
Dr Ricarda Vidal is a lecturer and curator. In 2005 she co-founded Betting on Shorts (BoSs), an independent cultural organisation focusing on shortfilm and artist video. BoSs’s main project is “More than a Eurovision of Shortfilm”, an international shortfilm competition with an open call for submissions and simultaneous screenings in ten cities in Europe and beyond. Several of the films shown at “Works on Water” are drawn from the BoSs archive.
www.bettingonshorts.com
The flux and reflux of this water, its sounds – continuous and oscillating – unrelentingly striking my eye and ear, supplanting the internal stirrings which reverie has extinguished in me and sufficing for making me sense with pleasure my existence, without active thought.
(Jean-Jacques Rousseau)
The six selected works in this show all explore different aspects of water. It appears as medium of change and symbol of permanence, as metaphor for thought and madness, but also quite literally as means of transport and artistic tool. But in all of them water is intricately connected to the pleasure (or the burden) of existence.
Commissioned to mark the opening of St Pancras International, Andrew Cross’s film Passage (passacaille) (2007) is about the journey from continental Europe to England.
Passage is interested in stillness and slowness, in the subtleties of place that are oblivious in high-speed travel. Situating his filmic style ’somewhere between Jean Luc Godard and a British Transport Films documentary’ Cross set out to create a slow-moving voyage through time, place and history. However, the final scene, which is filmed in the long Regent’s Canal tunnel at Angel (North London) and lasts almost one third of the entire film, goes beyond either time, place or history. Listening to Lang’s haunting music watching the still dark waters one can find Rousseau’s moment of pure existence beyond active thought.
Water is also the source of contemplation in Etta Säfve’s North Sea Low Tide (Ophelia) (2006-7), though here the still water of Cross’s canal scene or Rousseau’s Lac de Bienne is replaced by the crashing waves of the North Sea. The film is a poetic study of the sea, of change and permanence, of giving and taking inherent in the coming and going of the tide and the infinite repetition of waves after waves crashing onto the shore.
Whereas man and nature appear in complete harmony in Säfve’s film and madness appears as a – perhaps quite pleasant - alternative, Hervé Constant’s Out There (2006) explores the antagonism between man and the universe. The film is an adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s short story “Letters from a Madman” which traces the protagonist’s gradual descent into madness. In Constant’s visual interpretation of the story the sea becomes symbolic for the vastness of the unknown universe. And the paradoxically impenetrable transparency of water eventually marks the narrator’s final descent into madness.
Helen Fletcher’s short piece Rose Darling (2007) uses water as artistic tool and source of creation. Over a period of 5 minutes we watch water slipping away from a tangled confusion of black ink lines slowly revealing the delicate shape of a woman. As the woman reassembles her body from the initial chaos one is left to consider whether she has woken from deep sleep or a dream or whether she is recovering from a trauma. Like Säfve’s film, Rose Darling is based on an ephemeral and to some degree arbitrary process: the destruction of an ink drawing by pouring water over it. However by playing the film in reverse destruction becomes creation and the ephemeral attains permanence.
Robert Seidel, too, has used water as artistic tool. His work E3 (2002) is not so much on water as in water. The film is based on a diary painted in gouache which Seidel produced during a 3-month stay in the UK. E3, in which E stands for eternity and 3 for those three months, can be seen as a metaphor for life in general. Arranged in a cyclical structure the paintings morph into one another, sometimes smoothly, sometimes pulsating and sometimes with destructive force as the initial enthusiasm and energy of a new beginning gradually fade into the complete breakdown of excitement into the slug of the everyday before accelerating again. E3 is a series of visual and aural variations on this cycle, which happens over and over again.
Eitan Buganin’s film Pushkin (2006) at last has the most tenuous connection to water. Here it is only present in the sounds of the distant sea and in the silent poem of a one-legged black sailor that accompanies the images in subtitles as the camera descends through the leaves and branches of a tree onto the small figure of a baby girl riding a rocking horse. The distant sea can be seen as the source of storytelling but at the same time the repetitive permanence of its waves acts like white noise threatening to submerge everything. Pushkin is perhaps the strangest of the six films in this show. As the camera is slowly lowered in circles onto a close-up of the little girl we are drawn into this strange black and white world. Camouflaged by simplicity and amusement, Pushkin is disturbing. It plays with the politics of the black colour as a social signifier and is a metaphor of what stands between the intimate reflection of oneself and the perception held by the outside. The final line of the poem includes a stage direction: we are to read it out in a sudden and loud shout. We must enter this strange black world in order to follow this instruction, in order to break the circle of repetition and shout over the noisy silence of the waves.