Context

Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean expresses her interest in history, time and place through disciplined forms of observance. She is interested in the events in land and sky and our perception of these places and events, particularly in relationship to human acts. She also looks at how our perception of these events is examined through the tools we use to observe and interpret them.

Disappearance at Sea, 1996 is a work inspired by the story of Donald Crowhurst (1932–1969), a British businessman and amateur sailor who took his life while attempting a voyage around the world during which he falsified his progress. Shown on a loop, the fourteen-minute film consists of seven shots captured by a static camera that alternate between close-ups of the rotating lighthouse bulbs and footage looking out to sea. As the film progresses the scene changes from dusk to nightfall, with the colour of the sky shifting through a range of yellows, reds and purples.

“Time is measured out in the regular clank of the revolving lighthouse lamp. The camera is so close that the glass fills the screen. What we see is the lightbulb, as yet unlit, and sunbeams catching on the deeply bevelled edges of the glass, sometimes splitting into the spectrum. A glimpse of the headlands beyond is turned upside down by the convex lens. We might want to turn and look over the bay, but we must watch the works in the mirror of the lamp. The sun is increasingly orange, low enough to bulge and glow in the refracting atmosphere. The turns of the lamp measure out the time of the sunset. “

p.15 Tacita Dean: Landscape, Portrait, Still Life

Tacita Dean Disappearance at Sea, 1996

Dean creates a sense of temporal disorientation in the work. The passage of time in the film does not correspond with actual time, it has been suggested that this may be linked to Crowhurst’s own confusion at sea. Dean has noted that her fascination with the sea ‘can be traced back to eighteenth-century notions of the sublime, where elemental forces were used as emblems of turbulent and ungovernable human emotions’.

I am interested in the record of passing time (in the rising and receding tide and the filling and emptying of a tidal pool) and in how these events can be subverted through materials, repetition and location. Like Dean, I see the material quality and characteristics of medium as a fundamental tool in interpreting these events, and as an opportunity to perceive the events through a changed ‘lens’. Additionally the sea and water plays an important symbolic role in my work, as a record of passing time but also as an analogy for an inner psychological space, an association that is commonly used in Jungian psychology.

“For several minutes her camera holds in balance the bulb, not yet lie, and the sun, now nearly gone. There is an axis between them, and an invisible line of tension. We know that power will pass from one to the other; in the relay of day and night, the bulb will take on the task of illumination.”

p.16 Tacita Dean: Landscape, Portrait, Still Life

Mechanism and it’s interpretation of event is evident in this observation. A fundamental relationship is experienced jointly, and a tipping point is reached at the moment of handover. I am interested in the notion of tipping point, whether through material quality (where digital meets physical or traditional, or in subject where an empty pool becomes filled). It gives the work an underling feeling of being in influx, of elements shifting and in doing so imbues the work with a sense of tension and ephemerality. I am interested in using the metaphorical value of these themes as an analogue for psychological themes of growth, loss and conciliation, for which I use geographic imagery as an analogue.

Banewl, 2000, a sixty three minute film by Dean, documents a rare total eclipse, an event that cannot be viewed by the naked eye. During the first half of the film we scour the view for any change in light, an anticipation that once it has arrived at the midpoint of the film, dissipates, spelling the end of the drama and the resolution of the plot. Dean is asking questions about what expectation looks like in landscape. We have experienced a surreal and extraordinary moment that for a short period unified everything before it in darkness. The darkness of an eclipse has been likened to a memento mori, a symbol of death, like a rotting peach in Dutch painting. For a moment the possibility of a space outside or beyond reality has opened up, and what is left after the darkness has passed into our memory.

“Motion, however slight is the meeting of space and time, as is landscape; any given patch is always in the process of change, at a particular coincidence of era and place.”

p.31 Tacita Dean: Landscape, Portrait, Still Life

Tacita Dean Banewl, 1999

Dean’s practice often involves days or weeks of looking, she is allowing encouraging an event to take place, through luck and even ‘magic’ in a place. Patience and place is a fundamental part of her practice, as it is my own. Returning to a place, walking through it, sitting in it and documenting it provide opportunity for interpretation of the events within. Like Dean, I use optical mechanisms to record and discover, by using a camera, a projector or a laser cutter for example, different visual qualities are revealed. The point of exchange between these mediums also forces an examination of what of an experienced event has been captured and what will be lost in the exchange. I see these moments as analogous to how we experience a place or event and how that memory is collated in relation to an existing sense of self.

A frozen sense of time in my work is created by using the following methods:

Central objects that appear in isolation
A fragmented surface that falls away in a way that contradicts conventional space
Multiple views of the same moment at different times

I am interested in the paradoxical nature of exploring a frozen sense of time in work that is based in time based documentation. This is something that Dean is exploring in Banewl, an event in time that in itself takes us out of time.

“The cultural historian W.J.T. Mitchell formulates landscape not as a genre but as a practice, found in all cultures. For him, it is a medium of exchange between the human and the natural, the self and the other. Landscape is at the heart of the stories we tell ourselves, and is therefore always instrumental to power and politics. And yet landscape is also deeply personal, we inhabit it with our bodies and our minds. It is a sensory, dynamic medium; light, dark, hot, cold, dry and wet combine and fluctuate; when we remember landscapes, touch smell and sound are as important as sight. We also bring to bear all the pictures and poems of landscapes we have seen and heard, which frame and layer our perceptions. On an individual level landscape can only ever be biographical: place is to landscape as identity is to portraiture. It is temporal, and works on us with the potent forces of familiarity and strangeness, reality and imagination. Dean has an unusual ability to fuse universal, cultural and personal histories in her work through an intuitive synergy of medium, process and subject.”

p.31-32 Tacita Dean: Landscape, Portrait, Still Life

Markus Raetz

Markus Raetz uses drawing as a medium to ‘think with a pencil in his hand’ and as a way to ‘explore ways of seeing’.

“Bossuet, in his famous sermon 'On Providence,” uses the metaphor of ‘curious perspective’ (aka anamorphosis) to explain the paradox of the human condition to his congregation. If it appears that a kind God can conceive the chaos of the universe in which we live, in which injustice and disorder appear to hold sway, if we see the universe as lacking sense, it is simple because, according to Bossuet, we are not standing in the right spot.

As soon, however, as a person who is in on the secret shows you from what point you must look at it, everything is cleared up, and out of the chaos emerged a face with all its lineaments and proportions clear and distinct, where before there had been not semblance of a human countenance. This, as it seems to me, is a fairly accurate picture of the world in its apparent confusion and hidden justness, a justness which we can never discern except by looking at it from one point of view which faith in Jesus Christ reveals to us.””

p.172 Markus Raetz: Drawings

I am interested in perspective and this notion of ‘curious perspective’. Different viewpoints are embedded in my work at different points. For example, the initial sequential photographs from which I have been working are taken from a fixed view point. They tell the narrative of a fixed space and as a consequence any change of the elements within the viewpoint are emphasised across time. When I project and reassemble these photographs through projection, the flat viewpoint of the original photos is both emphasised and subverted. The flatness of the angled planes elongates the images at angles that are at odds with the original imagery, and additional viewpoints are created. When I install work onsite the images gain new perspective through the viewers location in the space. The repetitious images are presented at different levels, at different angles and in different light, encouraging the viewer to move around the work and discover it from different viewpoints. I am using this sense of space to manipulate the notion of sequence and ‘time out of time’, something that Raetz has investigated in his work:

“The hidden images no longer relate precisely to the images concealing them, other than through similar images that offer, not answers to questions, but further questions. Behind “this”, there is “that”, behind “me”, there is “us”, and behind “yes” is “no”, or to put it more accurately, there is always this in that, us in me, and no in yes.”

p.172 Markus Raetz: Drawings

Markus Raetz Head/Kopf, 1984

Markus Raetz Head/Kopf, 1984

Markus Raetz Head/Kopf, 1984

My work force the viewer to piece together a once complete image using dissonant fragments, whether across the surface of the paper or across space as an installation. In doing so I am challenging the viewer to ask questions and to construct their own journey through the work. Head provides the viewer with an ‘answer’ from one point of view, in the form of a figurative image:

“Raetz appoints himself a minor deus ex machina and arranges a small chaos, while at the same time indicating to the viewer the point where this chaos will resolve into a recognisable shape. But, for himself, he is constantly searching for the hidden image or, to be more precise, for that enigmatic tipping point where something - anything at all – can transform itself into an identifiable object, as if the world were populated with endless anamorphosis waiting to be explored.”

p.173 Markus Raetz: Drawings

My work does not provide a neat figurative solution in this way but instead asks the viewer to fill in what is figuratively missing with their own vocabulary, informed by their personal associations. There is no guarantee that a resolution will be reached however, objects exists in a liminal space, outside or between our own. By using sequence as a device in this context I am questioning its nature; can this be read linearly as a beginning, middle and end, or should the established semiotic understanding be questioned? Some areas of an image retain enough of the photographic original that they are read easily, surrounding areas however are granulated or elongated out of existence. The relationship between these areas gives the impression of something that has come into being before your eyes. This adds a further layer to the language of sequence and time passing.

“We are inclined to believe, perhaps because our own lives seem to be guided by this principle, that the world evolves gradually and progressively as a result of modest and continuous accretions – but we are mistaken. Everything around us is a matter of critical thresholds and moments…The same applies to accidental or conjectural images. It takes nothing more than a tiny intervention, an inflexion, an incision, an almost imperceptible arrangement, dictated by an informed eye to a skilled hand, as if in a fraction of a second, to cause an object or shapeless stain to cross the frontier that marks the image or sign.”

p.174-5 Markus Raetz: Drawings

In Praise of Shadows

Jun’ichiro Tanizaki

I am interested in creating a sense of space and environment in my work. I use large areas of darkness or negative space as a tool for manipulating a sense of scale. In the work From Within, From Without a large outer area of darkness is punctuated by a smaller area of bright vivid colour (used to depict a body of water). The ink used for this area is printed thinly so when installed in front of a light source it lights up and appears luminous in contrast to the thickly printed dark background. The intention was to evoke a sense of immense space in which a single image radiated.

“…in the old palace and the old house of pleasure the ceilings were high, the skirting corridors were wide, the rooms themselves were usually tens of feet long and wide, and the darkness must always have pressed in like a fog.…the man of today, long used to the electric light, has forgotten that such a darkness existed. It must have been simple for spectators to appear in a ‘visible darkness’, where always some seemed to be flickering and shimmering, a darkness that on occasion held greater terrors than darkness out of doors.”

I am interested in these two notions of darkness, a modern darkness, impeded by modern eclectic lighting, and an old deeper darkness in which unlit objects and figures could become lost or invisible. The idea of an old world in which small pockets of darkness would be lit by candle and all else would be black has a primordial quality to it. I am interested in using this to evoke a sense of being before or ‘out of time’ and that whatever exists within this space is fragile and fleeting. I am also interested in using a sense of ‘out of time’ to draw similarities to the unconscious inner world. A radiating object in a sea of darkness could also be seen as metaphorical for consciousness, a precious, momentary light source in a shapeless void.

“..the darkness broken only by a few candles, was of a richness quite different from the darkness of a small room…the darkness seemed to fall from the ceiling, lofty, intense, monolithic, the fragile light of the candle unable to pierce its thickness, turned back as from a black wall.

It was different in quality from the darkness on the road at night. It was a repletion, a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow. I blinked in spite of myself, as though to keep it out of my eyes.”

The Tears of Things

Peter Schwenger

The Dream Narrative of Debris

Figurative elements in sequence, whether pictorially on the surface of paper, or three dimensionally in installation, encourage the viewer find a sense of progress or narrative. In the passage The Dream Narrative of Debris Schwenger looks at the balance of specificity in narrative work. Schwenger considers that in order in order to create a narrative one must be careful not to over explain and a space must be left for the reader or viewer establish themselves into the work.

“Full coherence would mean the loss of narrative itself, which is a relationship between that demands difference and separation as much as linkage. Linkage itself, as I have stressed earlier, demands an otherness at the heart of similarity, or we would have only monadic identity. Thus it is as important that narrative discourse “fails to bind” as that it binds together separate objects.” (p.143)

He describes the separate elements of a work as ‘mental debris’, elements that the viewer attempts to fit them together in search of the narrative, however there is no explicit instruction as to the system they are working within. Lacking this, the viewer draws upon their own ‘systems of order’, formed by their memories and unconscious. In doing so the viewer creates what Schwenger refers to as ‘dream narratives’, a unique and personal response that creates a space of interplay between the work and the viewer. This is an interesting concept in relation to my work. My work contains semiotics of narrative (figurative elements in sequence), however, figuratively the information is limited and relies heavily on the artefacts of process and materiality, the interaction of colour and the construction of installation to form its whole. This leaves the viewer with much to do in forming a cohesive narrative of the work. Following Schwenger’s reasoning, in order to strive towards a resolution they must draw heavily on their own associations with the elements I have given them. In encouraging the viewer to engage their own unconscious in this way I am activating the work as a liminal space constructed on a framework of sequential imagery and three dimensional space.

“Various physical objects referenced by the text have now been translated into mental debris, a debris, to be sure that the reader is constantly trying to fit together without being in possession of a master plan. The associations evoked during that attempt often dart into personal memory and beyond into the unconscious – processes of reading that are akin to those of dreams. The dream narratives that result, hovering beneath the surface of even the most banal and conventional novel, are marked, as Haim Steinbach has observed, by a continual dislocation of desire. This refusal to be fixed in a stable context is curiously seductive, drawing us between the lines, words, and factual matter of any narrative.” (p.144)

I am treating the repetitious pictorial and structural elements of my work as a means to provoke ‘mental debris’. By manipulating the format of these sequences our understanding of repeated motif and format can be subverted. In the work To Hold Water, new associations are made in the same motif in the following ways:

The start point of each of the six rolls is set at a different place, when hung in parallel the adjacent motifs sit at different positions in relation to each other and create variations in negative space.
The printed paper rolls are different lengths. As a result the motifs read in various ways, some hang in the air and others fold and twist across the ground for example.
The atmospheric effects of the site; light, wall and ground, air current, have an effect on the motif and the structure as a whole. These effects are different at different points in the room, the size of the work leads to greater variation.

In the text below Schwenger examines how a child’s capacity to read narrative is characterised by both an absence of traditional order and a juxtaposition of individual elements. These conventions lead the content to be read in a less linear way which results in freeform, unconventional associations being made. A comparison can be made between this and the processes regarding an unconscious space through which associations are made in dreams. This is particularly interesting when looked at alongside Freud’s theory that fiction, or more generally, creative creation, can be seen in an adult as:

“replacing the play in which adults are no longer allowed to indulge, as it performs the same function of fulfilling wishes.” (p.146).

My work, being as it is, concerned with the unconscious has fundamental links with a freeform aesthetic that is associated with the dreamworld (or a ‘time out of time’), both in its pictorial content and the sequential three dimensional format.

Jean Piaget’s ‘The Language of Thought and the Child’, characterises child narratives by “an absence of order in the account given, and the fact that casual relationships are rarely expressed, but are generally indicated by a simple juxtaposition of the related terms. Marjorie Keller has argued that this indicated and antinarrative bias in Cornell. But I would contend that rather than eliminating narrative, or even subverting it, Cornell moved the narrative element to a liminal space where it may play in subtle and elusive ways. Piaget indicates the liminality of this space late in his book when he states that a child’s characteristic ways of ordering are an:

“Intermediate between logical thought and that process which the psychoanalysts have rather boldly described as the ‘symbolism’ of dreams." (p.145-46)

My process is characterized by a handover of techniques through which elements of an original image, or series of images are scrutinised and distorted, particularly at the point of handover between processes. These handovers are manipulated based on an understanding of characteristics, each process in relation to the next. These points of exchange play an important role in establishing a sense of dream/unconsciousness/metaphor, and is comparable to the way (above) in which a child formulates and correlates elements of a dream.

“Narrative fragments may appear in the dream, and the dream as a whole may be cast, misleadingly, as a coherent narrative. In general, Freud warns, “one must avoid seeking to explain one part of the manifest dream by another, as though the dream had been coherently conceived and was a logically arranged narrative. On the contrary, it is as a rule like a piece of breccia, composed of various fragments of rock held together by a kind of binding medium, so that the designs that appear on it do not belong to the original rock embedded in it. (Dream-work p181-82). The ‘designs of the dream’s fragments may of course very well be narrative designs, detached from their original coherence and jumbled. Narrative debris, in fact – are also a mode reminiscent of the way a child jumbles conventional narrative order." (p.146)

Sequential imagery in image or film is used with as a means for creating motion, and consequently narrative and explanation. However, in the unconscious no coherently narrative can be relied upon. My work is ‘breccia’, a composition of bound and fused elements. These elements cannot be relied upon to read provide a coherent narrative but must be reassemble collaboratively with the viewer, the work itself as a binding medium of cues for the viewer to act upon.

“Freud’s principles of dream construction: bricolage and breccia are both images of the way fragments from other contexts can be reassembled into significance by an elusive “binding medium, which is ultimately a mental operation.

For Levi Strauss, an important idea is one that occurs repeatedly in the narrative: “The function of repetition is to render the structure of the myth apparent”. For Freud, “the ideas which are most important among the dream thoughts will almost certainly be those which occur most often in them”. Both proceed by resisting the narrative coherence of the surface, instead establishing associations between elements of the dream that will ultimately reveal a deeper coherence-though their methods of establishing these associations are significantly different. Finally, narrative is swallowed up by a continuing narrative evolution, thus once again becoming a fragment of a newly elusive whole." (p.151)

The importance of an idea, or a motif, is reinforced through its repetition. In the unconscious recurrent images and themes are those that have fixed most thoroughly to self. They will force themselves into spaces in a way that is at odds with conventional narrative structure and bind themselves with elements of the proceeding environment. This process of amalgamation will burrow deeper into these unconscious spaces and in doing so create a constantly changing ‘whole’. I am interested in this idea in relation to installation of a work into a space (for example,my work To Hold Water and Dilston Gallery). The construction of a work onsite, and a capacity to engage with the space in relation to themes, format and shape of the work provides a rich opportunity to ‘bind’ elements of the space and the work and in doing so create a ‘new whole’ that elaborates and continues a thematic development of the work. The more I undertake these kinds of ambitious works the more it is clear that these themes are entirely appropriate for the existing themes in the work. Octavio Paz, describes Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes:

“They do not contain narratives. Rather, they open up narrative to the unpredictable and endless vagaries of dream: “cages for infinity,” Paz calls them. The paradox is doubled when we remember that not infinity but specific and limited debris makes up the contents of the box. What can be characterized as infinite is the narrative making impulse on the mind, which is continually elicited by the box’s objects." (p.154).

The infinite is present in the nature of the disrupted narrative that I examined in the previous paragraph; a liminal environment that contains multiple elements that defy conventional narrative and can only achieve resolution though a reanalyses of ‘whole’. A whole that is never fixed and is in a constant state of assimilating and adjusting to new and existing elements. I am exploring these themes in my work through repeated motifs depicting cyclical themes (the tide), exchange points of process and reconfiguration in elements in three dimensions.

”Incalculable connections are the stuff of our dreams, but also of our daily bread. We like nothing more than this crazy imbalance of cause and effect – it opens up horizons on our origins and on our potential power. They say that seduction is a strategy. Nothing could be more wrong. Seduction is a matter of these unexpected connections that any strategy can at best only attempt to reproduce. (Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, p.155)”. (p. 156)

The Object – Documents of Contemporary Art

A collection of essays by various authors, edited by Antony Hudek

Phyllida Barlow - The Sneeze of Louise

In this essay Phyllida Barlow looks at Marcel Duchamp’s work Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy? ,1921. Rose Sélavy was Duchamp's female alter ego whose name can be translated as 'physical love is life'. The work is a ‘readymade’ sculpture consisting of the following objects:

a birdcage
152 white sugar cubes, made of marble
a medical thermometer.
a piece of cuttlefish

Marcel Duchamp, Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy, 1921

Sneezing is used as a metaphor for erotic arousal, visually represented by the thermometer (a register of sickness or health) and the cuttle fish (an animal that expels ink when alarmed) have anticipatory and responsive mechanisms. Conversely the marble cubes, solid impenetrable, posing as sugar (sweetness) are a counter balance to the potential of the thermometer and cuttlefish. Marble takes millions of years to for, however it is still born of huge pressure and heat.

“Duchamp’s object is an object of measurement. It’s in suspense, held in time, unfolding itself continuously at the same moment, a constant reminder of the longed for and the about to be. Its tension is borne out of its implications of an unfulfilled sexual longing told by its disgusting and playful symbols."

The sum of these parts describes a possibility over time. A speculative sequence born in the head of the viewer. I am interested in the capacity of separate elements and processes to enforce a sense of anticipation and speculation through the process of questioning and configuring objects on paper and in space. I am also interested in how concise and poetic Duchamp is in his use of metaphor, without reduction to obvious visual calculations. Barlow continues to look at time in Cell (Eyes and Mirrors) by Louise Bourgeois:

“The work reveals itself as you approach it and walk around it. And it is as an unfolding space and as an unfolding object that it arouses response. These unfolding qualities are time-based and seem to refute image for a physically sensual experience which is to do with time, place and an all pervading atmosphere of fear. It is the element of time which enable me to compare the two works. In both works I experience a suspension of time through objects which act as instruments of measurement.”

Louise Bourgeois, Cells (Eyes and Mirrors), 1989-93

The mirrors within the work reflect the room around the viewer as they in turn navigate the work. The metal cage creates a feeling that something is trapped, is it the objects within the cage of the reflection of the viewer or the space the viewer occupies outside the cage. In this context the mirrors also serve as an instrument of surveillance. Like the thermometer and cuttlefish in Duchamp’s work, the mirror are a record of environmental change. I am interested in how these elements act as different ways to portray passing time and in doing so act as another way to represent sequence.

Both works are have objects contained within cages (or containers), I see my own work as a motifs contained within a repetitious format that could be interpreted as a container. These containers act as a grid, a structure that implies a system of order or means to compare and relate separate elements. Notions of ‘things having a place’ can be manipulate within this format to ask questions of what is contained and their relationship to each our and the viewer.

“Like the well used container case of Why Not Sneeze, this worn and weathered container has recorded on it its passage through time. Both have time integrated within them, and because of this they convey a sense of resignation. They can wait forever.”

The Poetics of Space

Gaston Bachelard

Intimate immensity

Bachelard looks at the relationship between the intimate and the immense. I am interested in these elements; as the intimate as an analogue for the inner or unconsciousness, and the immense as external events such as the tide, or sunrise and other cyclical events. In my work I tie these events to create as liminal space that sits between each, a space in which the divergent concepts can create a dialectic and dissonant language. An aesthetic that uses the language of inner to describe our experience and perception of the external.

“Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless man. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet day dreaming.” (p184)

I am interested in creating spaces in which points of reference are hidden and require resolution on the part of the viewer. With this sense of forced navigation the viewer is placed in a scenario in which they are lost and required to piece together fragments. The ‘search’ is an important part of my work as it is a metaphor for an exploration of environment and self.

“We do not have to be long in the woods to experience the always rather anxious impression of ‘going deeper and deeper’ into a limitless world. Soon, if we do not know where we are going, we no longer know where we are.”

When such daydreams as these take hold of meditating man, details grow dim and all picturesqueness fades. The very hours pass unnoticed and space stretches out interminably. Indeed, day dreams of this kind may well be called day-dreams of infinity. (p.189)