V.CHANCE RE-PRESENTING THE PHYSICAL ACT: AN EXPLORATION OF THE PHYSICAL PRESENCE OF THE BODY THROUGH ITS SCREEN REPRESENTATION VÉRONIQUE CHANCE SUBMITTED FOR PHD (ART) GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON MAY 2012 1 V.CHANCE Declaration by Candidate. I ________________________________________ hereby declare that this thesis is my own work and effort and that it has not been submitted anywhere for any other award. Where other sources of information have been used, I confirm that these have been indicated and acknowledged in the thesis. Signature: ………………………………………. Date: ……………………………………………. 2 V.CHANCE Abstract This thesis considers the dynamic relation between the physical presence of the body and its presence as a screen image1, through which I examine the impact of visual media technologies on our conceptions and perceptions of the body as a physical presence. The effects of these technologies on traditional notions and conditions of physicality and representation mark, I suggest, a shift in our relationship to, and understanding of the body as a physical presence as we become more used to interacting and communicating with the body through the immediacy of screen images. This has led I further suggest, to questions regarding the body as a material presence and to the technologically mediated image becoming associated with notions of disappearance and disembodiment. I understand however, the condition of the body as being very much embedded in a material world and I approach this project therefore, through the proposition of ‘the physicality of an image’ through which I argue for a reconceptualisation of the materiality of the body through its physical presence as an image. The research examines the relationship between video and performance in fine art practice, through which I consider the rhetorics of presence in relation to the politics of representation and reproduction inherent throughout the histories of their close alliance. It is my assertion that early experiments by artists using video to document performance acts during the 1960s and 1970s reveal a prescient understanding of the development of visual media technologies in ways that prefigure our contemporary moment. My understanding of this dynamic is extended through a consideration of concepts of visibility and invisibility and of formal structures of representation, to arrive at the paradoxical notion of embodied vision through an affective dimension of the body as it could be applied and conceived of as material or physical in relation to (or as a consequence of) temporal concerns in film and video works. 1 ‘Screen-image’ is understood here less in relation to a cinematic meaning of the term than through its historical association with and relationship to performance practices that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Whilst the focus is mainly on the uses of video, I also acknowledge the historical importance and uses of experimental film in this configuration. Both of these inform my own understanding of a contemporary screen image, especially through relationships to the projected screen image in video installations in particular. 3 V.CHANCE Use of Footnotes The writing of this thesis has covered extensive ground through which I have crossed into other fields in the histories of performance studies and experimental film in particular, in order to thoroughly explore their association and relationship in the research and exploration of a physical dynamic in the video image that I have tried to work my way through and articulate throughout this thesis. I have therefore felt it necessary to expand on particular subjects, contexts and critical terms that it was not appropriate to deal with in the body of the text, but that nonetheless needed to be addressed significantly in order to demonstrate a wider and more detailed understanding of the subject. As a consequence the footnotes, especially for Chapters Two and Three are particularly extensive. Whilst they still function as footnotes it is important that they are acknowledged in the reading of this thesis for a wider and more concrete understanding of the overall research project. 4 V.CHANCE Table of Contents Page Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………… 3 Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………… 6 Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………………… 7 Preface: (A Note on the Relationship Between Theoretical Discussions Raised in the Thesis and Contemporary Art Practices). 8 Introduction: 13 Chapter 1: How Can One Approach the Claim to the Physicality of an Image? 23 Chapter 2: Being: Material/Immaterial, Presence/Non Presence 46 (or On the Practice of Visibility) Chapter 3: Moving: Movement, Temporalities and Metaphorical Allusions 106 (or On Conceptions of Immediacy, Real-Time and Duration in Experiencing Video works). Conclusion: 173 Bibliography: 182 5 V.CHANCE Acknowledgments/Thanks With grateful thanks to Janet Hand, Nick de Ville and most recently to Andrea Phillips for restoring confidence in my writing abilities and for taking me on at a late stage in the project. 6 V.CHANCE To my Parents and to Richard 7 V.CHANCE Preface Whilst the emphasis of the thesis is historical it also asserts how historical approaches have informed contemporary artists' consideration of the impact of new technologies on their work. The artists referenced below are those whose practices acknowledge historical contexts whilst offering new insights into spectatorship by using traditional and emerging screen technologies. Initially it was the work of Matthew Barney that spoke most directly to the notion of physicality in the moving image both in the physical exertion he performs in these works and through the foregrounding of his body’s physical presence through sculptural elements proximate to the video screens, as if to physicalize the recorded actions. Although better known for The Cremaster Cycle2, Barney’s earlier video works clearly underpin the latter’s conceptual roots, with the human body and the presence of objects involved in the transformation and generation of physical form. Collectively titled The Drawing Restraint3, a project he continues to this day, these works directly demonstrate connections to performance practices of the 1960s and 1970s, through the testing of Barney’s body's limits in studio experiments building on his past as an athlete and 'remain only as relics and documents in the form of film, video, photographs, and artefacts' 4. In their insistence on materiality and the body, these works relentlessly problematise the relationship between performance, the artefact and documentation, all concerns central to this thesis.5 2 The Cremaster Cycle was an epic five-film project produced between 1994 and 2005. The title refers to the cremaster muscle, a thin muscle covering the male testis and spermatic chord which is responsible for the raising and lowering of the testicles, and is important in the determination of the male gender, appearing nine weeks after a foetus is conceived. Barney uses the descension of the cremaster muscle as a metaphor in his film series, which begins from a state of undifferentiated gender and weaves a narrative through the idea of the organism’s struggle to resist gender-definition to the point where (male) gender can no longer be denied. See Spector, N; Goodeve,T and Wakefield, N, ‘Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle’, Guggenheim Museum Publications, (2002) Reprinted (2004) 3 The title Drawing Restraint refers to the activity of drawing as a central drive for the work: at the heart Barney’s activities is the relationship between self-imposed resistance and creativity. This manifests itself in his attempts to create drawings whilst being hindered by obstacles and physical restraints. 4 Keller, Alexandra and Ward, Frazer " Matthew Barney and the Paradox of the Neo-Avant-Garde Blockbuster", in Cinema Journal 45, No.2, Winter (2006) p3 5 Although Barney’s earlier conceptual concerns in processes of creation are apparent in later work, the early work places more of an emphasis on directly performed physical actions and tasks as sequences in themselves within particular settings and less emphasis on high end production values in the highly costumed and elaborate film sets, characters and narratives which characterise the later cinematic works such as The Cremaster Cycle. 8 V.CHANCE Similarly, Piplilotti Rist considers the flesh of the body as a material and mutable form in the representation and performance of her embodied subjectivity through the technological mediation of the screen. Known for her single and multi-screen installations, her work relates to my concerns through its critique of the visual in the deployment of technology and seductive mechanisms inherent in popular culture, to directly address the viewer. Whilst multi- projected works such as Homo Sapiens, Sapiens (2005) immerse the viewer in a lush spectacle of sexuality, using heightened colours and sound to embody architectural and personal viewing space, the single screen work Open my Glade (2000), articulates the phenomenological notion of the screen-image as physical ‘flesh of the world’6 through Rist's literal flattening and distortion of her face against the image-screen, as if trying to break through its surface into the viewer's space. This recalls works by Ana Mendieta and Paul McCarthy, whose actions were similarly concerned with exploring the body as ‘flesh’ in the interconnected surfaces and spaces of body, image and screen.7 However, whilst the ‘meshing’ of the body with the screen image could be seen within a pervasive climate of the expansion of network television, Rist’s later work ‘negotiates a very different image system’8, in her public address from a giant LED screen high up in New York’s Times Square. Whilst the work must vie for the attention of viewers who, surrounded by myriad images may not even notice the work, it also tackles the globalised nature of the twenty-first-century’s system of image commodification, using its very tools ‘to shift the viewers just outside themselves and experience a flash of identification’9 in a broadcast that has no commercial intention, but seeks to ‘assault’ spectators emotionally.