Category: Contextual Research

Recently I’ve been reading more than looking at art works themselves, something that I’m aware of and will try to balance more successfully next term.

TRACEY ROSE – TKO
This piece comprises of a six-minute recording of the naked artist striking a punching bag with a camera attached to it with increasing force, slowing the footage down in certain parts before speeding it up again when impact occured. The physicality of the work was modulated by its subsequent projection onto a transparent scrim, which rippled and crumpled as if being physically affected by what was being projected onto it: a punching bag for the image.

(1)

According to ArtThrob.co.nz, “Recently, Rose’s work has become more abstract. The piece Rose refers to as “my masterpiece” is TKO (2000), which had its roots when Rose took up boxing and trained at a downtown Johannesburg gym for an extended period “because I wanted to beat up a curator who I thought put up an extremely crap show – I decided not to participate” Invited in 2000 to take up a residency at the prestigious ArtPace Institute in San Antonio, Texas, Rose proposed the piece which became TKO, in which the artist, unclothed, boxes a punching bag in an ever increasing crescendo of blows and cries, under the surveillance of four spy cameras, including one in the punching bag itself . “Monet’s waterlilies struck me – that commitment to the surface – my understanding of boxing was that it was an art, a passion, like dancing, and the intention was that each punch would be a mark, a gesture, building up to something”. The images are pale and shifting, the sounds urgent and guttural, and the artist/protagonist is both victim and aggressor, implicating the viewer in this complex visceral exchange.” (1)

RICHARD PRINCE – COWBOYS
I am not a fan of Richard Prince at all. He’s extremely problematic and I don’t believe that any his recent work does much to redeem himself as a white male artist with a considerable amount of power. However, I did find his 1989 piece Cowboys fairly interesting, in the sense of a male dominating a landscape in the name of advertising.
(2)
It reminded me of the tourism leaflets with the figure gazing across the Grand Canyon/New York City/A Norwegian Glacier etc.  that were talked about in Nick Kaye’s book on Site Specificity and Performance, which of course hark back to those romantic paintings of male figures standing over a sprawling landscape, displaying Caspar david Friedrich’s idea of the landscape being something to be both coveted and feared. I recently photoshopped the protagonist out of Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (as a pastiche of Paul Pfieffer), but I’m not sure if I’ll do anything with it.

PAUL PFEIFFER

The Pfeiffer work that I was recommended was The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Series, where the artist selected imagery from the NBA’s archive and ‘camouflaged’ critical contextual details of the scene, such as the basketball, players’ vest graphics, and even background players, leaving behind these eerie images of solitary figures lunging at nothing, followed by the wide eyes of a baying crowd.
These works were a follow up to an earlier series of work by the artist entitled 24 Landscapes, which at first do seem like ordinary seascapes, until you start to notice a sourceless shadow, or a set of tracks leading to the centre of the image before halting. These used to be images of Marilyn Monroe, but Pfeiffer edited her out of them, shifting the focus completely without giving the audience a choice.  This process of digitally ‘camouflaging’ is very interesting, and something I’d like to explore myself.

SHOWS (Painting)

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye/Cecily Brown @ ‘All Too Human’, Tate Britain

Michael Armitage @ SLG

Kaye Donachie @ Maureen Paley

(1) https://artthrob.co.za/01mar/artbio.html
(2) https://www.guggenheim.org/arts-curriculum/topic/cowboys
All other photos my own

I’m new to the idea of Affect, and it seems to be a tricky subject to breach. However, I think it could be useful when looking at the fictionalised physics of cartoon imagery and some of the other things I’m trying to understand within my work.
Below are a few branches of the theory, as summarised by Sean Owczarek. (This is for initial personal reference only: I will look into these further before accepting these brief explanations as accurate.)

”
Brian Massumi: Affect is a visceral, raw pre-feeling. Feelings are socially constructed distortions of affect. Affect is the manifestation of the body’s internalisation of an intensity. It cannot be rendered by language or any other kind of transmittable information. Affect is perpetually undulating and reforming. It is more bodily than cognitive. The body is integral to the understanding of affect. (***This is something else I’m looking into, with essays such as those in Carnal Thoughts exploring this***) Massumi describes the “walls” of the body as sensory receptors which allow for the intensity of an experience to be transmitted and internalised. The transmission of affect is not the exchange of affect from thing to body or body to body, it is the infolding and unfolding of intensities between the two bodies, which can be virtual or flesh. These intensities resonate apart from intended meaning of context.

Theresa Brennan: Teresa Brennan defines affect partially as, “any evaluative (positive or negative) orientation towards an object.” This idea identifies affect as a judgement rather than an emotion or an expression of an emotion. The parts of affect that can evaluate and judge will distinguish the physiological responses it evokes from those associated with influxes of passion or emotion. Brennan surmises that this is the important distinction between affect and emotion, as what one feels with and what one feels are two separate phenomena. She affirms that emotions correlate to pre-existing affective connections. However, she maintains that affects are physiological things. Emotions are forceful projections which are deposited or “dumped” after they are expressed, whereas affects can move more freely. Affects have the ability to intensify or weaken. Brennan defines the transmission of affect as the idea that our energies are not exclusively ours and that there is no distinction between the individual and their surroundings. Affects are continuously flowing in and out of both.

Patricia Clough (commenting on Massumi): Clough begins with Brian Massumi’s definition of affect as bodily responses which are removed from consciousness and arise instead from “visceral perception.” Massumi’s affect is about identifying the body as a hub of indeterminate responses. Affect is in a virtual space containing infinite potential. Massumi preserves the unconscious quality of affect by affirming that there is always a virtual “remainder” after emotion, language, and conscious perception. Consciousness is mundane in comparison as it reduces the complexity of affect. Massumi points to the emergence and potential of affect as it moves through a loop between virtual and actual. Clough specifies that Massumi’s idea of the body’s indeterminacy is not looking to the “pre-social” body. Massumi clarifies that affect is “open-endedly social.” In other words, that affect comes before the formation of distinctions between individuals. Affect exists in the temporality of emergence. This virtual temporality is the force that gives affect its autonomy from language, sensation, and emotion.

Sarah Ahmed: In contrast with Massumi, Ahmed doesn’t believe affect to be autonomous. Affect is a corresponding element of a preexisting object. She observes affect through how it relates to the experiential, and how our surrounding worlds effect us. Ahmed states, “Happiness remains about the contingency of what happens, but this ‘what’ becomes something good.” Happiness connects us to the objects we find pleasing, and we form profound bonds with these things. This pleasurable affect sustains itself through the comings and goings of the objects themselves. The ways in which our bodies relate to the things we find enjoyable also changes over time, as our impressions change as our bodies change. Affect arises through the evaluation of thing.

Megan Watkins: Affect has the ability to rouse people in one moment, and then move quickly away from the minds of the affected. Watkins questions whether or not there are residual effects of affect. She notes Spinoza’s distinction between affectus (the force of the object catalyzing affect), and affectio (the impact of affectus). Affect has the ability to leave residual pieces behind which can then influence an individuals’ subjectivities and perceptions. This differs from Massumi, who believes affect to be a fleeting escape from confinement. The accumulation of information is seemingly reserved for phenomena such as memories, which then cause emotion. However, Watkins understands affect as having the capacity to collect over time as a bodily memory that can both effect cognition and move outside the parameters of one’s consciousness.

Gregory J. Seigworth & Melissa Gregg: Seigworth and Gregg begin An Inventory of Shimmers by identifying affect’s “in-betweenness” (in this case, the in-between-ness to act and be acted upon). Their theory describes affect as both a movement within a state of relation between different things or people, and the exchange of intensities (as well as the duration of the movements between these intensities). Seigworth and Gregg view affects as forces that: exist on a guttural, Ur level; are removed from cognitive “knowingness”; and move beyond emotion. Affect spurs people to move, think, extend, and intensify. Seigworth and Gregg also note the problem with interchanging the word “force” with “affect,” considering affect is not necessarily forceful in every case. Affect is more of an event which occurs during exchanges and movements between intensities. Affect is created within an in-between space. This space exists between two or more intensities. Affect is the state that exists between the utterance of a word and the meaning of the word. It rises from in-between-ness and lives in a state of beside-ness.
”

I’ve started reading ‘Ordinary Affects’ by Kathleen Stewart, and there’s a section within the first chapter that seems to allude to Seigworth, Gregg, Ahmed and Massumi’s lines of thinking. This idea of Affect as something accumulating and moving between bodies, objects and places, never quite reachable through language or emotion, and, as described “at once abstract and concrete”. It’s this kind of constant shifting that I was to explore in relation to the imagery and ideas I’m looking at, as stated above.

Books and Essays still to read:

Jill Bennett – Practical Aesthetics
RARA Series
Kathleen Stewart – Ordinary Affect
Simon O’Sullivan – The Aesthetics of Affect

Through the consumption of many American coming of age films; American punk tour documentaries like 1991: The Year Punk Broke (Sonic Youth) and I Hate The Way You Love (The Kills); books like Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre and an endless stream of  VHS midwestern emo garage show recordings on YouTube, suburban and rural America (if a little romanticised) always intrigued me greatly throughout my teen years. There were so many parallels to growing up in rural England yet it seemed intangibly alien, and on a very trivial level, so much more exciting. It goes without saying that America is dealing with a lot of really terrible issues at the moment, and again, it goes without saying that it often doesn’t deal with them very well. These impacts often  with documentaries like Tracey Droz-Tragos-directed Rich Hill revealing this. I’m not sure what it is that’s so incomprehensible and exciting to me about the idea of growing up there – maybe it’s because as a destination it’s so much more expensive than Europe and so always seemed inaccessible, I don’t know.
Equally, the landscapes seem familiar yet more expansive, again more exciting, as if you could disappear into them and actually find something interesting. I grew up surrounded by fields but never really felt this, and of course don’t now that I live in London. There seem to be more in-between spaces to explore in America, which makes sense considering there are some towns and areas that can’t be traversed without a lengthy car drive. A few pieces come to mind when thinking of these American in-betweens, such as Robert Smithson’s Monuments of Passaic. The artist took the bus from New York City to his birthplace of Passaic, new Jersey, taking with him “a note book, a camera, The New York Times and a science fiction novel by Brian W. Aldiss entitled Earthworks.” (1) What resulted was the aforementioned essay along with a selection of photos displaying the ‘holes’ that Smithson saw in Passaic, a place on the brink of death and birth simultaneously.
I also recently watched a documentary directed by Monteith McCollum about his grandfather and farmer in the Depression era, Milford Beeghly, who grew obsessed with developing a hybrid species of black and white corn, and how this impacted his family and, eventually, the whole midwestern farming system. Although a strange topic for a film, it was a beautiful study of pragmatic spiritual values and emotional inhibitions, as well as showing light, form and space in a surprisingly interesting way. The film featured many strange stop-start animations, for example. Dirt would begin to creep into frame and cover family photographs, and ears of corn would start dancing across work surfaces, jerkily revolving on their axises.
The film is beautifully shot, with many of the lingering landscapes and Bresson-esque close-ups of hands making a particular impression (see below):

Although not directly (or maybe not at all) related to my work, these strange American ‘slice of life’ movies always attract me, and makes me to make more films.

 

 

Vocal Sample: Alan Watts, ‘Divine God and Death’ (starts at 43:24)

 

For a few months now, I have been wanting to make a film (previously written about on this blog) displaying an audience-less wrestling match in a remote rural location. I haven’t been able to film it yet due to complications with actors as well as me annoyingly prioritising less demanding tasks and projects, but I am still keen on making it happen. In my head, I always imagine the scene in slow motion with some kind of musical audio (although I can’t decide what this would be as music can often have too much of a cliche/stylised impact on moving image work). I can’t envision silent realtime footage of two people struggling against each other in the middle of a field as anything other than comical, which has led me to consider what it is about slow-motion that takes away comedy from movement and gives it an (assumed) sense of an epic act.

Speed’s role in the overall effect of moving image

Slow motion is so overused within pop-cultural pieces of film making that it’s tricky to come across one music video without it. The kinds of music videos that strike me the most are for contemporary rap music, often referred to by people who don’t like it as ‘mumble-rap’. I’m not a huge fan of the genre, I think it can be problematic at times, but I do find myself wanting to learn about it. I find it interesting that most of the lyrical content is about lifestyle, money and respect rather than the more ’emotionally driven’ content such as relationships that is otherwise in the charts, which of course is no less vapid, and probably not as true. It’s also interesting how rap historically has always broken the fourth wall in a sense, in that alliances or ‘beef’ with other artists in the same sphere are often referenced within songs themselves, something that I can’t place as strongly within other genres. But I digress.
This technique is of course very prominent within many other kinds of music videos, pop being a primary example. However, it’s the content of rap videos that I find interesting in conjunction with the altered speed. Almost all tracks within this subgenre have similar structures, tempos and subject matter, and the same goes for their visual counterparts, which often replace narrative-driven storylines with a collection of shots of the artists rapping and dancing outside of cars, in mansions or in constructed sets. Slow motion (and the quick transition between slo-mo and real time speed) is a solid part of the formula for these kinds of music videos, and quite often is integral in gravitating the ‘seriousness’ of the video. Without the audio or the change in speed (i.e. how they were originally filmed), the scenes depicted could be seen as comical. (this is especially relevant in the Lil Peep video shown below. It consists of a pretty dull and predictable series of events that suddenly seem ‘romantic’ because they’re displayed in slow motion with a somewhat-melancholic backing track.)
In this instance, I see slow motion as a kind of safety-net for making things look cooler, similar to how in art school there’s often the cliché of “oh, just make it bigger”. It doesn’t always work.

When researching why we as humans love slow-motion, and why it makes things look ‘cooler’, I came across an article by neurologist David Eagleman that states three reasons, as quoted below:

” 1: More time gives a proxy for denser memories

I recently posted about the claim that time slows during a life-threatening event. To the best that we were able to address this, our studies suggested that the impression of slowed time is a trick of memory: denser memories are laid down during salient events, yielding more than the normal amount of detail when read back out. So one can speculate that slow motion video gives a proxy for this extra-dense memory: by presenting a scene slowly, one can enjoy a rich experience with plenty of time to dwell on all the details that normally leak away from us. In other words, when a movie scene is presented slowly we can grab onto and remember many details, just as we do during a real-life high-adrenaline moment.

This idea can explain the natural introduction of slow motion videography into scenes of violence. The first American movie to use slow motion was Bonnie and Clyde. Much to the shock of the audience, the cinematography went into balletic slow motion as the two main characters of the movie met their violent end under a hailstorm of bullets from the police. As Bonnie and Clyde lived out their final seconds, the audience got several extra seconds in which to appreciate it. The director, Arthur Penn, had an intuition about what he was doing; he reported: “The intention there was to get this…attenuation of time that one experiences when you see something, like a terrible automobile accident.” Although critics at the time called the slowing of the death scene gratuitous and callous, the idea caught on. Giving the audience a heightened ability to catch and remember details worked well and has been imitated thousands of times since.

But note that not all interesting slow-mo videography involves high-adrenaline situations, indicating that there may be more to it–and this leads us to the next point.

2: Slow motion extends human perception by unmasking hidden data

From a transhumanist perspective, slow motion videography is a technology that allows us to extend our senses beyond their natural capacities. It allows the revelation of data hidden in the folds of time, just as a microscope allows us to appreciate the wonders of a fly’s wing or a microbe’s choreography.

As one example, consider microexpressions, the fast movement of facial muscles that pass rapidly and unconsciously over peoples’ faces. Microexpressions are normally not accessible to awareness (the owner’s or the viewer’s) because they are too brief. But they can reveal all sorts of secrets, including when someone is lying. For example, when Susan Smith got on the TV news to plead for help in finding her kidnapped children, a slowed-down version revealed micro-expressions that could suggest (at least, with the benefit of hindsight) that she was lying about the whole event. Slow motion video unmasks the world of these temporally hidden facial clues.

Moreover, by unveiling things undetectable by consciousness, slow motion can allow not just temporal sleuthing but temporal intimacy. Consider this passage by the British sports writer Matt Rendell about the 1998 Tour de France winner Marco Pantani. Writing about the use of super slow-motion cameras in sport, Rendell penned what I consider to be one of the most beautiful passages in sports writing:

Now, as he rides towards victory in the Giro d’Italia, the camera almost caresses him. The five seconds between the moment Marco appeared in the closing straight and the moment he crossed the finish line are extruded to fifteen enduring seconds. The image frames his head and little else, revealing details invisible in real time and at standard resolution: a drop of sweat that falls from his chin as he makes the bend, the gaping jaw and crumpled forehead and lines beneath the eyes that deepen as Marco wrings still more speed from the mountain. Then – and it must be the moment he crosses the line – he begins to rise out of his agony. The torso rises to vertical, the arms spread out into a crucifix position, the eyelids descend, and Marco’s face lifts towards the sky. It is a moment of transfiguration, visible only in super slo-mo or in still – and only the best of the finish-line photographers catch it. Super slo-mo shows us something we could never otherwise see – involuntary gestures Marco never chose to reveal, perhaps because, without super slo-mo technology, he cannot know he makes them. The public knows more about Marco than Marco himself: a truth, we are tempted to imagine, and one that has nothing to do with the race outcome as such, for the pictures frame out the finish line and the clock, and show nothing of his work rate, muscular toil or the relative positions of the riders that yield the race result. Instead, we find ourselves looking into Marco’s face the way a mother and her baby might, or lovers at the moment their affection is first reciprocated.

3: Time-warped video holds our attention by violating expectations

Finally, note that brains develop deeply-wired expectations about Newtonian physics. For example, when a ball gets thrown in the air, your brain unconsciously uses its internal models to predict where and when is it going to hit. These models are so ingrained into our nervous systems that if you lob a tennis ball to an astronaut in zero-g, he will still move his hand to catch it as though he’s in a normal 1-g environment.

I suspect that the high level of engagement during slow-mo video is related to a violation of these expectations about physics. Imagine you are watching The Matrix, and Trinity leaps into the air to kick an agent. Your brain makes (unconscious) predictions about exactly when she’s going to come back down. But, shockingly, time slows down and Trinity hangs in the air longer than expected. Your expectations about when she will land have been violated.

As for why we find this interesting, it is probably because these violations hold our attention. Attention is maximally engaged when predictions are violated (an old idea that Jeff Hawkins summarizes nicely in his book On Intelligence). So my speculation, then, is that we like time-warped video because it is very attention-engaging: we are constantly getting the temporal predictions wrong, and so we are constantly on alert. In support of this, a very engaging style of cinematography is to rapidly alternate between speeding and slowing (think of the battle scenes in 300), thereby holding our attention throughout.” (1)

Audio’s role in the overall effect of moving image

One track that I do think would suit the wrestling film is ‘Paint’ by Alex G, an abrasive industrial track from one of his unreleased BandCamp Singles of the same name. It’s heavy on the percussion and has a rattling, fat snare sound that reverberates into the noise behind it like a punch. I think that in reality this audio may be overpowering and may dictate the feel of the film more than the content itself, so I would have to play around with manipulating it or using something else entirely. However, it feels safer and as if it could be more impactful as a piece with strong musical audio, as opposed to tuneless diagetic sound. Again,I feel like I use the idea of audio as a safety net to keep people engaged with my moving image work, and add a sense of seriousness to it.
A few months ago, a meme circulated Facebook for a brief period of time, consisting of a ‘dance’ scene from Spiderman with the backing music removed and realistic audio inserted in place of it. Having never seen the original film, the realistic version was still quite uncomfortable and awkward to watch. Similarly to the use of slow motion above, it made me wonder what audio does to the brain to make this otherwise cringe-worthy scene acceptable and maybe even enviable to viewers. (I watched the scene with the original audio and it’s still pretty awful but comic fans like that stuff.)

‘Realistic’ version

Original Version (Scene starts at 3:15)

 

 

 

 

 

(1) Eagleman, D.,  ‘Why do we love slow motion video?’, 2009
http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/2009/02/why-do-we-love-slow-motion-video.html

 

Both made under the film studio A24, two films that have made a major impression on me this year are ‘A Ghost Story’, directed by David Lowery, and ‘The Florida Project’, by Sean Baker. Although different in agenda, what I took away from them mutually was the idea of time as a major theme, even though it was dealt with in very different ways.

A Ghost Story – Dir. David Lowery, 2017

The theme of time is more prevalent in A Ghost Story. Centred around the grieving wife of a man who dies suddenly in a car crash whilst he watches her as a ghost, unable to talk to her, it’s a story that explores the enormity of time, somehow managing to fit in hundreds of years worth of experience whilst simultaneously including scenes such as “a five-minute, uninterrupted take in which the wife eats an entire family-size pie slumped on the kitchen floor, then runs to the loo to throw up.”(1)
Even after the ghost’s wife moves out of the house, he stays trapped there, watching the lives of strangers unfold in the house that he should’ve been living in. This silent observation continues until the site of his old home is replaced by a large office building in the middle of a built-up city that has developed around him. He wanders the office block alone for some time until he decides to try and commit suicide (somehow) by jumping off the top of the office block. The scenes that follow are in my opinion some of the most poignant. Instead of leaving forever, he instead is transported back to the very beginnings of his home, and watches the initial stakes of the building being hammered in by a 19th Century European settler and his family. After a few weeks of living on the site and beginning to build the house, the family are killed by Native Americans. The camera lingers on the body of the family’s youngest child, before switching to the ghost watching her silently for a few seconds, unmoving. the camera then switches back to the girl, who now remains only as a rotting corpse, almost completely skeletal. This scene stuck with me as a particularly aching display of the scale of time, and dispelled an ongoing desire of mine to be able to observe a spot forever because of how painfully slow the reality of it is. Although it doesn’t end up being the case, the possibility of infinite time for this ghost is very real, and it’s terrifying.

Trailer:

The Florida Project – Dir. Sean Baker, 2017

If A Ghost Story is a longitudinal look at time, focusing on one place and moving up and down its entire timeline, then perhaps The Florida Project could be described as looking at time laterally, focussing only on the present but narrowing it down to look at a very small group of people in a set geographical location, providing the viewer with a modern-day ‘slice of life’ look into the experiences of a of society that’s often overlooked. Set over the span of a summer holiday, the film follows a 6-year old girl named Moonee living with her young mother in The Magic Castle Inn, a low budget extended-stay motel on W. Irlo Bronson Memorial Highway, Kissimmee, just miles from Disney World itself. It reminds me of J.G. Ballard’s 1974 novel ‘Concrete Island’, set in a derelict ‘island’ underneath the junction of three motorways leading out of London. This spot, so close to the urban sophistication of London, becomes the main character’s own personal hell, just out of public reach yet still very much present. The Florida Project runs in a similar, if less severe, vein.
In one of its reviews for the film, Mark Kermode (The Guardian) wrote, “It all adds up to another superbly sympathetic portrait of marginalised experience from a film-maker whose great triumph is that he never feels like a tourist. This is Moonee’s world, and for a couple of hours at least, we are privileged to live in it.” (2)
I do indeed find it an absolute privilege to be able to observe this world that I myself have been unknowingly so close to when visiting Disney Land as a child and again as a teenager. Although I don’t remember seeing The Magic Castle Inn itself when driving through Kissimmee, there are countless similar locations along the highway. As a 9 year old child, I didn’t notice these ‘in-between’ spots, but on my second trip aged 17 (which was more for my sister, who was 14 at the time) the ‘in-between’ times of driving past cheap gift shops, tiny churches with monumental crucifix’s and run-down i-Hops became a lot more interesting to me than the parks themselves. Although I didn’t get many, I tried to take photos along the highway (shown below) and often wish I could go back to the places in the photos and just observe them without being in a moving vehicle. The Florida Project gave me a chance to do that and I’m extremely grateful for it.

I am however aware that the purpose of The Florida Project isn’t to give viewers a pastel-pretty insight into this problem that they can forget about after watching, or simply ignore in favour of the cinematography. The problems faced by the characters in the film are as real as the motel in which it was filmed, and I don’t want to come across as voyeuristic or uncaring when talking about it. I tried to focus on the elements of the film that run more in parallel with what I’m trying to figure out within my own work, but I am of course mindful that that’s not the point of it, and nor should it be.

Trailer:

(1) https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/aug/09/a-ghost-story-interview-david-lowery-casey-affleck-rooney-mara-pie

(2) https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/nov/12/the-florida-project-review-sunshine-state-of-mind