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THE DNA of a Movement
foreword to the THE OPEN PRIZE catalogue by Anthony Haden-Guest
Contemporary art is, of course, all about liberty, about breaking rules, except that it can also be about making rules, both implicit and explicit. Think of Andre Breton, “The Pope of Surrealism,” excommunicating Salvador Dali with the stinging anagram, “Avida Dollars.” Or Donald Judd policing Minimalism – a term he disliked – issuing Black Spot equivalents to those he didn’t think cut the mustard, like Tony Smith.
And you might say that rules are nowhere more likely to play a fruitful part than in the huge, unruly field of the new photography. After all, photographers have been getting their effects from tricksiness and sleight of hand from the very beginning. Eadweard Muybridge, whose time-lapse photo-sequences of a running man, a galloping horse and the like in the 1870s brought a scientific probity to the infant form, was happy to archive one piece of a photograph that pleased him – a shot of, say, the moon - and transferring it from one negative to another.
It was to safeguard their collective reputation that news and documentary photographers have, as the phrase cine-verite indicates, always seemed to promise a kind of absolute truth. This was especially the case when the craft was practiced by the secular priesthood of Magnum. Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the founders of that agency, would tape a camera to near-invisibility as he set off on the spoor of the Decisive Moment. If he was spotted snapping, picture-making was over. Carter-Bresson was so averse to any hint of pictorial dissimulation that he even forswore cropping.
As a writer I have worked with Magnum photographers from time to time. Their willingness to devote months and years to a project was admirable, sometimes awesome. Don McCullin’s photograph of a thrown grenade sailing unexploded through the air tells you what you need to know about Magnum in general and McCullin particular.
And yet, and yet. The shot of the falling Republican soldier taken by another of Magnum’s founders, Robert Capa, has been decisively shown to have been a set-up. So too was Robert Doisneau’s, The Kiss, when a couple sued, claiming to be the lovebirds in the shot, so due a franc or so, and Doisneau produced the contract signed by the actors he had hired for the shoot. Indeed there is a persistent rumour that Cartier-Bresson’s shot of the small boy leaping over a puddle was in fact cropped. But, such lapses aside, Magnum was and is a great enterprise, itself a long Decisive Moment, and 20th century photographer would have been lesser without it.
Which brings us to the rule-making ambitiousness of Video Painting. The system, which was drawn up less than a decade ago by Hilary Lawson, seem as useful in the deliquescent world of video as Magnum’s principles were in the shadowland of news photography. And the actual rules, which are not dissimilar to those practiced by the moviemakers of the Dogma movement, are simple.
It’s a time-based form, though no time limits are prescribed. Each shot is a single fixed frame. Each piece is a single take. There is no editing, no montage, indeed no hi or lo-tech jiggery-pokery whatsoever. What the viewer sees on-screen is just what he or she would see with an eye stuck to the lens. And every piece is shot in real time. So there is no spectral sense of an infinitesimally melting freeze, as in Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho or in Alicia Framis’s piece set in the Van Gogh Museum.
It sounds rigorous to the point of limiting expressive possibilities. Right? Indeed, when I had got the rules into my head and before I began looking at the actual pieces I rather imagined that what I would be looking at would be … well, pure video paintings. Like slow-moving Rothkos. Or the faux naturama that confronts the audience at the beginning of Soylent Green.
Wrong. I should have had more confidence in my feelings about the way that limitations can focus and strengthen. In fact, there is a remarkable breadth and variety in this short list. I won’t do a bite-sized bit on each, though, just reference a few that suggest some of the different approaches to which Video Painting lends itself.
Karolina Raczynska’s dark central image is apparently an asexual orifice. But you take your time, you become sensitized, you pick up on clues - Aha! Lip wrinkles! - as you realize just what it is that you are looking at. Which only strengthens the impact, because the spectacle of a human mouth, opening and closing toothlessly, swimming in and out of focus, is a brave and scary thing.
Alexder Bates’s Simmer is apparently an abstract image, a surface, that could be extremely close or immeasurably distant, but which is –as the title indicates - boiling milk, So that piece did come fairly close to the slo-mo Rothkos I had half-expected, except it was more like an activated Robert Ryman. Then there’s the Marc Atkinson piece which swiftly resolves from an abstraction into a streaming window-pane, looking out on … a window-box? A back-garden? Who knows? But beyond is a streetscape in constantly shifting focus, malformed by glass and water into a kind of a Daliesque melt.
Rita Ribas thrusts us into a peopled world. There’s a concrete sandwich of a building, clearly on the seaside, deserted, then ebbing and flowing with people, and even when one knows what to expect from a Video Painting, the ordinary human reaction sets in, which is to decode the comings and goings, to search for the missing story or stories, and this gives the piece the galvanic opacity of mid-career Jean-Luc Godard.
And finally Olwen Coughlan’ Acedia – the word used in the Middle Ages to describe boredom so deep that it paralysed the will and threatened the immortal soul – seems to stretch Video Painting’s parameters, threatening the rules a teensy bit by including four vivid and spluttery-colored video screens. So it’s back to those damned rules. Which somehow make sense in that what might have been just a random show of videos at loose in the art world sprawl somehow achieves a focus, the DNA of a movement.
Anthony Haden-Guest, July 2010
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