Entries categorized as ‘Art’
Tacita Dean is renowned for her 16mm film installations as well as for other works closely related to the films including photogravures, drawings on alabaster, overpainted photographs, sound recordings on magnetic tape, installation works and objets trouvés. Running through all her work is an obsession with time, with perception, with the nature of seeing: with things that lie outside of time or on the verge of disappearance.
Yesterday I went to the Tacita Dean exhibition at ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art), in Melbourne. Kodak (2006) is a 44 minute, 16mm film installation shot by Dean at the Kodak factory in Chalon-sur-Saône, France. The film production facility was closing down; Dean is here to witness a point of departure.
I’m in awe of Dean’s films, but you have to ’stay the pace’ to truly breathe in the lost spaces, timelessness and sense of ‘passing’ that her work evokes. Kodak is set in a factory. I generally associate factories with noise and bright lights, but the Kodak factory space that Dean presents is deeply meditative. Nobody seems in a hurry as they routinely go about their work. Sound is subdued, yet constant throughout, while the ‘production line’ of film is seen as rythmic and fluid. The lighting in the factory and the colours created by the celluloid running through the machinery appear symbiotic.
The factory workers, in their white boiler suits, quietly load and unload large spools of film. These methodical workers hover about like nurses comforting a dying patient. They are attentive, professional, but have the demeanour of those who know they are witnessing life ebbing away. In this instance, Dean is capturing celluloid in its death throes, threading its way through miles of machinery: celluloid without a story, but still able to project abstract images of glistening colour – flashes of peacock blue and smudgy red – determined to show its vibrancy even though its days are numbered.
Dean makes you stop and think. Her films make you stop and watch. It’s only by staying in a moment for much longer than the moment, that Dean’s camera forces you to see differently. Or maybe it’s not that you see, but that you begin to absorb the small, seemingly insignificant details – the quietness. About process. About the beauty in the banal. About the things we miss, because we just don’t look hard enough. About the death of industries and how things vanish while we are looking the other way. Of knowing too late. Of d.i.s.i.n.t.e.g.r.a.t.i.o.n.
Kodak is one of several films at the exhibition. If only I had time to tell you about the English man and his apple orchard, or Merce Cunningham. Both are mesmerising. Go see for yourself!
Tacinta Dean showing at ACCA
6 June 2009 – 2 August 2009
Categories: Art
I’ve just read Giuliana Bruno’s splendid book called, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film. Writing about architecture, art, film, memory, cartography, motion and (e)motion, Bruno maps a cultural history of spatio-visual arts.
A book infused with the ‘female perspective’; ideas on domestic and intimate space, the body, haptic geography, and the transposition of cinema space into gallery and museum space. All areas that tie in with my research interests. It has nothing to do with home movies, yet has everything to do with home movies. It’s about the power of lived spaces, emotions and memories. Nothing is fixed, all is fluid. I love this idea that Bruno has about our bodies as maps:
Film and architecture are practices of representation written on, and by, the body map. As dwelling-places of gender, they are loci for the production of sexuality, not simply vehicles for its representation. Insofar as they are productions of space, their imaging is to be understood as an actual map – a construction lived by users.
Film and architecture share a dimension of living that in Italian is called vissuto, the space of one’s lived experiences…they are about lived space and the narrative of place. They are both inhabited sites and spaces for inhabitation, narrativized by motion. Such types of dwelling always construct a subjectivity. Their subjectivity is the physical self occupying narrativized space, who leaves traces of her history on the wall and on the screen. Crossing between perceived, conceived, and lived space, the spatial arts thus embody the viewer (Bruno 64-65).
Bruno argues that although we think of film as a visual medium, it is as much about the positioning and movement of the body in space – hence it is, as she puts it, ‘haptic’.
The installation space becomes a renewed theater of image (re)collection, which both takes the place of and interfaces with that performative space the movie theatre has represented for the last century and continues to embody. An archive of moving images comes to be displaced in hybrid, residual interfacing (347 Bruno).
I can’t help but think this book will help me enormously in my work. It’s just hard for me to articulate how, as these ideas are all so fresh in my mind and need to settle awhile. Such a voyage of discovery!
Categories: Art · cinema · culture · home movies
I was in Sydney last week and went to the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I entered a surreal world filled with organic shapes and lots of polka dots. Yayoi makes large paintings, soft sculptures and environmental sculptures. As a child, she suffered from hallucinations and began seeing dots – lots of dots. They have become a lifelong obsession.
Art makes me think in different ways; it gives me the ability to view the world through someone else’s gaze. I assume this is the case for most people. What I got from Yayoi’s vision was a sense of boundlessness – freedom from space, time, gender, location & ‘normality’.
Entering her Infinity Room initially takes your breath away. You walk through a door into a room. You know you are in a tiny room, but you feel suspended in a space that has no walls, floor or ceiling. Through lights and mirrors, I could instantly suspend believe and simply float in infinity. You become a small part of this silent, colourful, magical, timeless cosmos.
It’s an exhibition I wanted to immediately revisit and explore in greater depth. I returned to Melbourne without doing so. Hopefully I’ll get back to Sydney before the exhibition closes in June.
Yayoi Kusama Dots Obsession
Categories: Art
Tagged: art, culture, visualisation
Christian Thompson Bidjarra/Kunja people Black Gum 2 (from ‘Australian Graffiti’ series) 2008 Purchased 2008. The Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
I love this photo. I find it evocative and quietly unsettling. Black Gum 2 (from ‘Australian Graffiti’ series 2008) is part of the “Breaking Boundaries: Contemporary Indigenous Australian art from the Collection”, on show now at the Queensland Art Gallery: Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane.
Categories: Art · culture
