A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Humanities And
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Temporality and the Evocation of Fear and Unease in Selected Video Installations Patricia Driscoll A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in Fine Arts by Dissertation. Johannesburg, 2012 Declaration: I declare that this dissertation is my own unaided work. It is submitted for the degree of Master of Arts in Fine Arts in the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. It has not been submitted before for any other degree or examination in any other university. _________________________ Patricia Driscoll __________ day of _________, 2012 ii Abstract: In this research I explore the evocation of fear and unease in selected video installations and how time impacts upon such evocation. For this purpose I consider the works of selected contemporary artists who deal directly with a form of time-based hyper-awareness linked to the experience of trauma, fear and panic. Amongst others, I discuss selected video artworks by Douglas Gordon, Ed Atkins, and South African artists William Kentridge, Kendell Geers and Berni Searle. I examine how such artworks engage with the expansion and collapse of time and experiences of being stuck or being absorbed in a significant moment. In undertaking this research I closely examine the mediums of film and video as well as contexts and the installation formats in which they are presented. I explore similar aspects of evoking unease in my own video installation titled Night-light and the supporting video work submitted for this degree. My previous creative experience has been in still photography in which I had become interested in exploring the capturing of time and movement and imparting an immersive temporal dimension or an extended moment in time in the still image. I see my exploration of the medium of video installation for the MA submission as an extension of such explorations in a new medium through which I further explore the concern with a temporal dynamic and its relationship to the emotion and experience of (personal) unease. iii Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Walter Oltmann for his assistance and advice. iv Table of Contents: Introduction: 1 Temporality in contemporary art 1 Time in film, video and video installation art 3 Temporality, fear, unease and trauma in contemporary video installation art 7 Chapter 1: Video installation art: 14 Chapter 2: Evoking Fear and Unease: 27 The Cultural Phenomenon of Fear 27 The emotion of fear and unease in cinema/film and video installation art 35 Explorations of time and the evocation of fear and unease in selected video installations 47 Fear, unease and the uncanny 55 Chapter 3: Contemporary video installation artists exploring temporality and the evocation of fear and unease: 58 Douglas Gordon 59 Film Noir (Perspire), Film Noir (Hand), Film Noir (Twins), Film Noir (Fly), Film Noir (Fear) (all 1995) 60 Trauma and Repetition, 10Ms -1 (1994) 63 24 Hour Psycho (1993) 64 The Unconscious in Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho 65 Selected South African Contemporary Video Artists 66 Kendell Geers (1968) 74 William Kentridge (1955) 78 Berni Searle (1964) 81 Chapter 4: My own work: Night-light: 85 Conclusion: 101 Bibliography: 104 v Introduction: Temporality in contemporary art: Temporality involves the unfolding of time or speaks about the condition of being bounded in time. In their book Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art After 1980, Jean Robertson and Craig MacDaniel (2005: 33) point out that “[t]ime is a vital topic in contemporary art, addressed in a rich range of works that involve a variety of media, approaches and concepts.” Recent explorations in the visual arts frequently foreground the temporal nature of aesthetic experience as Grant H Kester observes in the following passage from his book Conversation Pieces – Community and Communication in Modern Art: From Vito Acconci’s Seedbed to Dan Graham’s video projects to Adrian Piper’s “Catalysis” performances to Allan Kaprow’s happenings to James Turrell’s light installations, the viewer is called upon to participate in, move around, interact with, and literally complete the work of art in a myriad of ways. Here the “de-materialization” of the art object described by critic Lucy Lippard must be understood not simply as a defensive tactic designed to forestall commodification but also as a positive or creative moment, marked by an increasing emphasis on art as a process of collaborative interaction. This interactive orientation implies, in turn, an art experience that extends over time (2005: 53). While artists such as the ones mentioned above do not reject the optical or the object-based condition of art entirely, they “tend to focus on the ways in which optical experience is conditioned by a given social context or physical situation and by the viewer’s participation” and represent a movement toward a “catalyzation of the viewer, the movement toward direct interaction, [which] decisively shifts the locus of aesthetic meaning from the moment of creative plenitude in the solitary act of making (or the viewer’s imaginative reconstruction of this act) to a social and discursive realm of shared experience, dialogue, and physical movement” (ibid: 54). Such explorations in contemporary art that engage the viewer’s physical and cognitive interaction as integral to the artwork, i.e. that include him/her as a collaborator of sorts, were disparaged by formalist critic Michael Fried as “theatrical 1 art” in his critical essay Art and Objecthood (1967) in which he suggested that Minimalism had betrayed Modernism’s exploration of the medium. He felt that the Minimalists had compromised the quality of art by becoming too emphatic about the materiality of their works, which resulted in an interactive experience for the viewer – and thus introduced a form of “theatricality” to the visual arts. 1 Ironically, Fried’s essay inadvertently focused attention on establishing a theoretical basis for Minimalism and underscored it as a movement based in phenomenological experience. Fried objected to such artworks for their unselfconscious immersion of viewers, leading them into a state of distracted attention (rather than focusing on formal complexity, the organization of harmonious colour relationships, etc). The “viewers become conscious of the mediating effects of light, space, and their own movement on their perception of the work of art. This surrounding phenomenological envelope becomes the “real” work of art toward which their attention is directed” (ibid). In a chapter titled “Duration, Performativity, and Critique,” Kester points to the art of the 1960s and 1970s as a “relatively subtle movement away from the artwork as self-contained entity and toward a more dialogical relationship to the viewer” and examines contemporary artists who develop such an interest in the interaction between the durational and the dialogical. Such artists understand art as an “event” rather than an object – “an event, more-over, that is intended to produce a transformation in the viewer’s consciousness of the world” (ibid: 61-62). Film and video technologies have been used extensively in the light of such an understanding of art to create temporal works that engage with narrative and non-narrative strategies in exploring temporality and the structures of time: duration, speed, rhythm and direction. In the following section I will examine such explorations more closely as they relate to the medium of film and video and to practices of contemporary video installation. 1 Formalist critics such as Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried “elevated the visual per se into the dominant condition of art making” and rejected the representational, narrative function of art (Kester, 2004: 51). 2 Time in film, video and video installation art: Time is clearly central to the durational medium of film/video and video installation art in which it is “embodied […] through optical illusions of movement.” With the invention of cinema in the nineteenth century, artists were finally able to produce a convincing illusion of moving images. In films and other media showing moving images (such as flipbooks and lantern slide shows), time appears to flow as it does in the actual world of the viewer, as Irene Natta notes: “In motion pictures the individual moment dissolves in a continuous narrative, whereas the narrative in a fixed image emerges from the individual moment depicted” (Robertson and McDaniel, 2005: 43). Since its early beginnings, fine artists have chosen the simplest technique of using a single camera and filming a continuous event in one take, or have borrowed editing and montage techniques from commercial films and advertising to create narrative complexity. Film and video techniques have also been used to create temporal works that are non-narrative and plotless (ibid: 44-45). Considering the medium of film and video in a broader context of mass media, Robertson and McDaniel comment that: Cinema and television became the dominant means for creating visual narratives for mass audiences over the past century. Although the plots in commercial films tend to be conventional, the way stories are told visually is extremely sophisticated because of the development of editing and montage techniques that can carefully shape a story shot by shot. We also have witnessed the proliferation of a highly condensed visual narrative from what Vicki Goldberg characterizes as “the stroboscopic story, told in a flash,” evidenced in movie trailers, music videos and television commercials (ibid: 43-44). 2 2 Art historian and critic Sven Lutticken (Douglas & Eamon, 2009: 58) addresses this issue in his essay Liberating Time (2009) warning against the cliché of overstating this phenomenon. He explains as follows, While ideologizations do not automatically invalidate any form of artistic production, the overly rhetorical and abstract opposition between mainstream film and the ‘liberated’ temporality of film and video art has in fact led to facile and rhetorical stagings of artistic difference.