Thanks for reading the Live Journal. While the “live” element of this blog has now ceased, the journal will continue to stay online as the legacy document of the LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images. Comment threads at the bottom of the writers’ posts will remain open for further discussion.

The Live Journal – comprising writers Amy Budd, Thomas Morgan Evans and Jonathan P Watts – has responded to the 2012 biennial directly from the space of display. Our production has been mobile, immediate, and often written in parallel with the biennial’s screenings, performances and panel discussions. Our interviews have been conducted in the ICAs offices and cafes, recorded in the cinema auditoriums between screenings, while other reports have been written and filed directly from our seats in the audience.

This close proximity to our subject matter has produced a type of writing and reportage noticeably different in tone and texture from criticism that acquires distance afforded by time. This is to say that these writings are reactions as opposed to reflections. The blog emphasises the intensity and often collaborative nature of reactive writing. From our embedded situation, we have given multiple accounts of the biennial. Some are celebratory, others critical. We have worked collectively, discussing individual blog posts, themes and artworks, extending one another’s commentary, and at time contesting our own individual arguments.

This now-static blog is a survey of the diverse comments, ideas and responses that come not only from the Live Journal team, but also from the artists and curators we interviewed or who have chosen to respond in their own words. Thus, there is no one voice that offers a primary narrative of the 2012 biennial. And for our differences, the Live Journal is richer and, we would argue, a true reflection of events as they happened.

Bill Drummond campaigning for No Music Day

In his book Retromania, music critic Simon Reynolds writes on the effects of the proliferation of music enabled by MP3 compression, file sharing and streaming online. In one respect, compression of files causes quality degradation, but for Reynolds, the MP3’s proliferation has social and emotional consequences too. With the introduction of the MP3, music has become a “devalued currency”: there is just too much of it, which, paradoxically, has led not to greater appreciation of music, but diminished emotional investment. It is the tyranny of choice.

Attempts to negotiate this continuous supply make it “fatally susceptible to discontinuity” by pausing, rewind/fast-forward and saving for later. It all amounts to a desanctification of music: the MP3 has eroded the ritual role and social catharsis of collective music listening because of this continuous supply.

We are living through the era in which music sheds its last vestigal traces of kronos (the ancient Greek word for peak time, the times of the event or the epiphany) and its final subordination to ‘chronos’ (the quantitive time of work and leisure).

Reynolds diagnoses a number of symptoms that seem to counter the subordination of music to values of utility. Bill Drummond’s No Music Day campaign, an annual invite on 21 November to boycott listening to recorded music, is an attempt to halt the “voiding of music’s meaning and purpose”. Healthy audience figures at gigs and festivals also suggest a desire for immersed affective spaces of concentrated listening and the singular event. LP records continue to sell. Resistance to the flood of online material tends towards simple abstinence, a renewed emphasis on the embodied experience of place and championing of older slower media.

Ben Rivers, 'Two Years at Sea', 16mm blown up to 35mm, 86m

Appetite for knocked-off Ben Rivers films doesn’t quite rival that for, say, Jay-Z and Kanye West albums. Granted, artists’ moving image is marginal next to pop music, but my question is this: with the accelerated reproduction and distribution of digital media online, isn’t artists’ moving image also subject to potential devaluing and erosion of social and emotional affect?

Last year, Tacita Dean used her public profile to petition against the Soho Film Lab’s decision to cease printing 16mm film, a decision made at a moment when film was in renaissance among artists. There are many filmmakers, Dean included, who are careful not to allow digital reproductions into circulation. Ute Aurand (featured in Ben Rivers’ programme Friends with Benefits) is another example: against the wash of digital media, her material is entirely absent online. Resistance against digital degradation characterises and sanctifies this residual media. While Dean’s petition was unsuccessful (an artists’ renaissance of 16mm does not necessarily equal a viable company profit), the strength of support sparked public debate about the relative virtues of digital versus analogue.

YouTube, Ubuweb and archive.org have become essential educational tools. While these ever-expanding digital archives enable access to obscurest material, they do so by untethering works from original viewing conditions, occluding proper methods of display. (In my last piece, David Larcher and William Raban were given as examples of filmmakers whose works gain critical effectivity from specific viewing conditions). Vigilance towards ideal sites of display is a way to counter the emptying of criticality that digital proliferation entails. In an age of deterritorialisations and mobility, it is perhaps inherently conservative to insist on sitedness. Against a backdrop of online image proliferation, combined with the speed of the biennial, it begins to look radical.

Codec video compression image degradation illustration

It is in light of the vast resources invested in biennales, triennales, documentas and manifestas (as well as the circulation of objects, texts and films in our contemporary image culture) that art theorist Boris Groys figures the installation in this way – as a radical stabilisation. In his essay Politics of Installation, Groys’ primary concern is to differentiate the role of the artist from that of the curator, a difference he draws out by analysing the traditional exhibition, the artistic installation and the biennial. Despite the vast amounts of money invested in biennials, Groys claims their function is not to serve buyers, but the public. The biennial realises art, not as individual commodities to be traded, but as part of mass culture – an exhibition practice envisaged by avant-garde movements such as Bauhaus and Vkhutemas. He understands contemporary art as an exhibition practice, which accounts for the difficulty of differentiating the two dominant figures of the contemporary art world: the artist and the curator.

For Groys, installation is the democratic material medium par excellence. Just as canvas is the material support of the painting, space is the material support of installation. Inside this space, within the gallery, hierarchy between objects disappear: each installed thing is equally as important as the next. Unlike the promiscuous image, the installation does not circulate. Rather, it gathers everything that usually circulates – image, objects, texts, films – by installing them.

In general, the installation operates as a reversal of reproduction. The installation takes a copy out of an unmarked, open space of anonymous circulation and places it – if only temporarily – within a fixed, stable, closed context of the topologically well-defined “here and now”.

In the temporary residence of the installation space, the promiscuous image gains aura. If the installation is a practice of display, the artists’ logic of inclusion and exclusion is sovereign. Within the institution, however, the curator’s decision is not sovereign. Their logic of inclusion and exclusion is bound to a greater extent because it interfaces with a public on behalf of an institution.

What transformations occur when artists’ moving image is levied from its installation site and put into play as an autonomous artwork?  Migration to the screening auditorium effects a disembodiment of experience and narrowing of perspectives. The ambulatory mode of viewing is jettisoned for a single point perspective. Furthermore, the moving image is disentangled from its accompanying objects and actions – surely a narrative lack?

Isolated from installation, the moving image is emptied of aura (lent by the “here and now”). It becomes subject to the curator’s logic of inclusion and exclusion determined by a set of concerns different to the artists’. In the auditorium, we submit to the curator’s authorial view. Admittedly, no artwork is free of institutional framing; if we follow Groys, the installation is kind of temporary sovereign utopia. Thus, showing artists’ moving image levied from its installation at a biennial removes it from a topologically defined “here and now”, and in doing so negates the production of this temporary stabilising space.

Occluding proper methods of display compromises the criticality of works, stops short affective qualities and stunts narrative. At the LUX/ICA Biennial, curator Stuart Comer chaired a panel discussion on what it means for an artist from a gallery background to make a feature film and present it in a cinema. Little talk occurred about what it might mean to do the reverse of what I have described so far: to show artists’ short films in the screening room. The truth is that most artists’ moving image is seen in the gallery or online, not in the cinema. Work screened within the architecture of the cinema is subject to all the conventions of cinema viewing behaviour. Isolated from contingencies of the gallery and computer screen, cinema viewing offers its own stabilising quality. In biennial cinema screen-time, no digital footprint is left behind; there will be no pop-up adverts for Volvo or Brit-pop compilations while watching Voyage on the North Sea. For filmmakers from a gallery background, the rules of the cinema can have a liberating effect. The highest quality projector and a perfectly blackened room makes for an optimum viewing condition often lacking in the contingencies of the gallery space: white wall, dust, mobile people and accidents.

Cinema works are lavished with an unusual quality of attention. It is harder to come and go, and not only because everyone in the row next to you has to rise. In the gallery, you’ve probably not paid a fiver so it is easier to walk out unphased. Viewers are less likely to discuss work in a cinema for fear of recrimination. However, single-screen projection excludes the simultaneity of multi-screen works (no Nam June Paik) enforcing a sequencing logic of one after another.

At the LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images, all the moving image programmes occurred within the cinema space. Certainly, in this context it is fascinating to see how artists’ film behaves. If historically the value of artists’ moving image has been its institutional promiscuity, I would be wary of this singular reliance on the cinema. This wariness is doubly granted because it almost always involves levying work from ideal viewing conditions.

Claire Hooper, 'Eris: The Path of ER', 2011/12, performance and video. Courtesy Hollybush Gardens

Mark Webber, Irm and Ed Sommer, Nitsch; Ed Halter and Thomas Beard, Luther Price, Shelly Winters; Rosa Barba, Jordan Lavi Quellman, The Deteriorationists; Yann Chateigné Tytelman, Eric Duvivier, Concerto mécanique pour la folie (or La folle mécanomorphose); Elena Filipovic, Harald Thys and Jos de Gruyter, Die Fregatte; Electra, Claire Hooper, Eris: The Path of ER.

Listed against the conventions of proper reference, with no dates and no medium, and in order of curator, artist and title, are some works from this year’s LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images. All of them contain explicit references to violence towards women.

Although we are now in David Cameron’s era of “calm down dear”, in 2004 the previous government commissioned a report on interpersonal violence which resulted in Sylvia Walby and Jonathan Allen’s Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault and Stalking. Here is a carelessly chosen passage from this harrowing document:

17% of women and 2% per cent of men had been sexually assaulted at least once since they were 16. 4% of women had been raped and 1% had experienced another type of serious sexual assault since the age of 16, so that altogether 5% of women had suffered a serious sexual assault.

In 2001, it was estimated that nearly half of all women go through some kind of sexual violence, domestic abuse, or are wounded in some way within interpersonal relationships, including instances of stalking.

This prevalence continues, and it is reflected in the art we have seen. Yet the relationship, in both directions, between what is seen in the cinema and what the statistics say is heavily mediated. Of course, artists are free to interpret the subject matter in any way they see fit. In this case, none of the aforementioned works or individuals can be said to try to persuade viewers to abuse. Curators choose works of art based on, among other things, their artistic merit, while audience members give their money and favour according to any number of reasons.

In articles written during this biennial, I have addressed various forms of critical detachment: detachment from an idea of the real within the ‘hyperreality’ of the digital world; detachment from narratives that, in our everyday lives, help us get to grips with how we feel; and detachment through an idea that what is ‘abstract’ or indirect, and has no ability to speak to the real conditions of social life.

Luther Price, 'Inkblot #13', 2008 and 'Inkblot #31', 2009, handpainted 16mm film strip. © Luther Price

This last statement was made in relation to Luther Price’s visually stunning yet difficult work. In the series of his films shown by curators Ed Halter and Thomas Beard of Light Industry, the last film, Shelly Winters, features a soundtrack in which victims and abusers recollect their experiences while a ‘blank’ reel of 16mm stock runs through the projector.

I want to start here, having provided some context with reference to the violent content of many of the films at the first LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images – content I was going to call controversial, but, and this is the problem this article addresses, has not been.

While watching 9 Films by Luther Price, I was both uncomfortable and captivated. The cinema became a world, an experience that strategically counteracts cinema’s traditionally immersive image-world on screen. Sat there, I had the thought that if the world was somehow fair, if there was equality, then that world would be as arresting, difficult and sensate as Luther Price’s films. Bad things wouldn’t go away but would instead invade the space of the good. If you took away the barriers that protect privileges and condemn weakness (those barriers currently enforced, but not inherently or originally constructed by capitalism), what you’d get would be a situation that was as difficult and as good as Price’s work. It would also, I would guess, look like Price’s films. Price’s films, then, are in this way noble.

These images of a world – what I would call a “global view” – is not geographic. It does not distinguish necessarily different places and people, but different ways of seeing and states of mind. I mean something specific with the notion of a “global view”’ then: I don’t mean a perspective that accounts for experiences outside those that are hegemonically “western”. I mean, more generally, an attempt to see and represent in a way that is both easy and difficult, and accounts for what is both easy and difficult to account for. This is a refusal of the rose-tinted version of things, but also a refusal of an average, quantified view of things. It is to see from the grey area, rather than see into it, while maintaining the effect of all the horrors and delights there are to see.

Claire Hooper, 'Eris: The Path of ER', 2011/12, performance and video. Courtesy Hollybush Gardens

Perhaps he’d disagree, but in interviewing Ed Halter, I got the sense of Price as someone “in his own world”. But “being in your own world” has a perverse logic in this context of the global view. Could it not be that an expression of total solipsism represents the actual world better than representations of the world from single, determined points of view? That, taken on balance, the “world in one’s head” is, by an admittedly expansive allegorical leap, closer to the “real world” than the view from one’s head? Cut off in his studio, I imagined that Price could produce a global view. The films do not represent an image of the world but, being hermetically sealed within the materiality of the encounter, they give the audience a direct, disembodied ‘projection’ of solipsism. There is no elsewhere in Price’s films, the space of projection is total. It is this quality that made me think about Price’s films in terms of an extended metaphor for the “real world’, one where all elements are accounted for simultaneously. The film is a vortex: a centrifugal force which throws matter and images across a stream of light. It is as if the whole world has been uprooted and is now presented without distinction between what is good and what is bad. It becomes both, and thus does the experience of watching. And if these films present a view of the world, a global view, then the world is like a film: spinning, as it does, around a great source of light.

What makes us see “locally”, as it were, what blinkers our view from the global, we call ideology. If division is so much a part of vision and if we, as those who should have noticed, cannot actually see the LUX/ICA Biennial could have instead been called (and not necessarily in judgement, though perhaps reductively) “visions of the violation of women”, we can only speculate about what the social world on a global scale is really like. There is no real social account, no “real” idea, of what sexual violence, racism, war, or any other kind of injustice is like outside of systems, which, through means of capitalist relations, are inherently unfair. These injustices, which divide us between the haves and the have-nots, would not necessarily divide us if the system did not flourish as divisive; they’d just be singular facts of human inequity.

In the context of this global vision, violence against women divides those that choose to be affected by its presence and those that choose to remain ignorant. It is a part of the real world that Claire Hooper’s Eris: The Path of ER gave impressive witness to at the biennial. But what Hooper’s and, in a curious way, Price’s work presents, but perhaps the organisers, audience members and critics seemed to have missed, was the global perspective that accounts for this fact in the context of spectacle. We must make the world in our heads and the world outside them more like these artists’ work if we want to be able to address our responsibility and begin to heal: “Keep thy mind in hell and despair not.”

This relatively recent development was presented as grounds for debate at the LUX / ICA Biennial of Moving Images, where a panel discussion on Theatricality and Staging considered contemporary approaches to representing the body and language through performance and theatricality in film and video. Chaired by curator Bridget Crone, debates unfolded around the concept of “staging”. The contributions from the panellists – artist Beatrice Gibson, curator Vanessa Desclaux, Pil & Galia Kollectiv, and Crone – subsequently inform the basis of this text. Moving beyond the rubric of the biennial by examining practices absent from its programme enables a wider consideration of theatricality in film to take place. Here, I examine the role performative documentation plays in problematising boundaries between stage and screen, and take into account the shadowy position of the viewer, who recedes from view as the dialectic between stage and screen changes.

Vito Acconci, ‘Undertone’, 1972, video

As a foreground to contemporary trends, it is necessary to take a retrospective look at the initial incorporation of performative gestures in early video art, as in the recorded actions of Acconci and Joan Jonas, who preclude contemporary configurations of theatricality in film via their own video-based transformations. Repeatedly turning the camera on himself, Acconci’s physically charged videos stage performative acts of confrontation and technological manipulation in a bid to transform the relationship between audience, artist and public space. In his recoding of Undertone (1972), Acconci appears before the camera, seated at a table, murmuring a cyclical fantasy of a girl caressing his lower body. At episodic intervals, his delusion is interrupted by asking the camera, “I need you to be there, sitting there, facing me.” Appealing to an audience beyond the fourth wall of the monitor challenges the status of the viewer as a passive consumer of sensations. But Acconci’s audience is not necessary here. Rather, the camera suffices as Acconi’s totemic witness, a prototype of the Youtube broadcasting, performing for a scopic lens that has no regard for an audience.

Joan Jonas, ‘Glass Puzzle’, 1973, video

The technological advancement of television also provides a central concern for Jonas, who recalls, “every move was for the monitor”. Frequently employing the aesthetic trope of recording from video playback, first seen in Vertical Roll (1972) in which the artist plays jump-rope with out-of-sync electrical frequencies rolling across a monitor screen, Jonas takes this giddy ruse further by producing spatial illusions and complex mirror-play in the single channel black and white video Glass Puzzle (1973). In the video, two mute female protagonists are projected live in and across the surface of a single monitor. It has an aesthetic of double-exposure: inside the screen of the monitor plays a video recording of female figures enacting a series of embodied gestures; while another camera simultaneously records physical actions and impressions taking place in the domestic space around it (walking, windows, furniture, movement), and the image of this action reflecting across the monitors screen used like a mirror. Transposing spatial reflections and motion on top of abstract, sculptural light and dark photogram sequences, Glass Puzzle situates the monitor as both surface for performative presentation – a physical object for video transmission.

Thirty years on, and the orchestration of performance continues to inform contemporary film and video, moving beyond the singularity of the televisual feedback to produce temporary communities via a host of incorporated theatrical devices. This engagement has expanded beyond a mere preoccupation with contemporary technologies (for Acconci and Jonas such technology was, of course, the newly available Portapak video camera), but also in a range of media that includes the near-obsolescent. Rosalind Nashashibi’s meta-theatrical 16mm films often appear to initially document the daily lives of others. But more than that, her films posit allusions to theatre, through the repeated examination with the ritual of rehearsal. In Jack Straw’s Castle (2009), the pre-performance preparations of a film crew setting up equipment on location emerges as grounds for phenomenological interrogation, while the uncanny aspect of actors going through the motions is distilled in the photographic series In Rehearsal (2009).

Rosalind Nashashibi, 'Jack Straw's Castle', 2009, 16mm film, color, sound, 17m. Courtesy Tulips & Roses

Nashashibi’s most recent work migrates its focus from theatre to dance; yet still focusing on the unconsummated rituals of (non) performance, by examining the collision of private and public realms in Lovely Young People (Beautiful Supple Bodies) (2012). Filmed entirely in the privacy of the Scottish National Ballet studios, Nashashibi’s camera renders the liminal space for rehearsal into public spectacle, studying the stiff interaction between groups of locals invited into the space to quietly observe company dancers practising their routines. The slow gaze of the camera enhances the disparity between these two realities colliding in a single, communal space, punctured with scenes of ‘ordinariness’ as snippets of casual mid-rehearsal conversation between performers and passive voyeurs are surreptitiously caught on camera.

Rosalind Nashashibi, 'Lovely Young People (Beautiful Supple Bodies)', 2012. Courtesy Tulips & Roses

Although contrived, this public intrusion into the microcosmic world of dance engenders an act of exposure, the film camera acting as the coiled rope pulling away the stage curtain to reveal the ritual of rehearsal and the site of the studio as a space of transgression, where mistakes are permitted and identities are in flux. An interesting triangulation between performers and viewers also emerges. Scrutiny is diverted away from the dancers and towards the faces of non-performing spectators, thus making way for a third dimension of voyeurism: our own, the film audience. Lovely Young People (Beautiful Supple Bodies) interrogates not only the ambiguity of performance, but also disturbs codes of appropriate behaviour, professionalism of the dancers is put on edge through slip ups and errors, the informal, environment of the studio transformed into a theatrical arena via the hushed silence of intruding guests. For Nashashibi, this portrait of rehearsal examines the “metamorphical moment when you are neither fully fictionalised nor within your own ‘real’ self”. We witness a passing between personas.

Similar ritualised aspects of performance are also exposed in video documentation of performance artist Giles Bailey’s reworkings of the monologue script. Often culminating in gallery-based presentations, Bailey meshes moving image with theatricality by collaging an esoteric range of cultural references, relating to cinema, literature and the visual realm into complex, scripted soliloquies. In performance, the artist is transformed into an anti, or alter-historical raconteur, meshing criticality with melodrama as he recites alternative narratives on fictitious mid-century scientists, French New Wave cinema, or the derailed sexual fantasies of iconic video artists.

Giles Bailey, 'All Whirlwind, Heat and Flash (Undertone)', 2011, performance

Restaging Acconci’s Undertone (1972), Bailey’s video-performance All Whirlwind, Heat, and Flash (Undertone), (2011) constructs a counter narrative for the exploited female figure evoked in Acconci’s original masturbatory fantasy. Bailey performs alongside a monitor that displays Undertone without the original soundtrack. A stereo performance/projection directly intercepts history. Bailey’s new script is seductive, initially employing sensuous language that indulges Acconci’s libidinal desire. But as the character portrait unfolds, so do the cinematic clichés: “it was all whirlwind, heat, and flash”. A passionate counter narrative of love, betrayal, murders and car chases between Acconci and his female phantasm fill the void of Acconci’s silenced voiceover. As Bailey notes, theatrical modes of writing can offer the possibility of the script as a site for historical intervention.

Although not unique in contemporary practices (with text-based performance similarly negotiated in the dramaturgical writings of Cally Spooner, and the tangential narratives of Alexandre Singh’s acetate lectures), Bailey’s subtle use of staging during performance aligns his work with the physical conventions of theatre, in both text and production. Seated in front of a stepladder, lighting reflector, and other strange props, lends the video documentation of All Whirlwind, Heat, and Flash (Undertone) a Brechtian anti-illusionary aesthetic, returning the site of the event to the informality of the rehearsal, where performance is a work in progress, incomplete and open to interventions.

While considering the function of more prosaic aspects of theatricality in performance documentation and moving image, it seems necessary to return to the dialectical conception of the ‘stage’, as explored during the talk Theatricality and Staging. Crone prefaced the discussion by quoting from the interview ‘A Theatre of Operations’ between philosopher Alain Badiou and Elie During. In the interview Badiou asserts, “I think that there is a theatre when there is a public exhibition, with or without a stage”, thus cleaving open the possibility for conceiving of theatre, or theatricality in general, within the unrestricted spatial and temporal remits of moving image. He continues,

Theatre is a complex ordering system whose material series is not set in stone: texts of course but bodies, costumes, the set, the site, music, light.

A myriad of mutable theatrical facets engender, as Crone pointed out, opportunities for

complicating and re-imagining the division between body and image, between what is experience and what is imagined, what is immediate and what is mediated, and what is live and what is not-live.

The convergence of staging, script and set and costume design can be read within a multitude of contemporary artistic practice. For Grace Schwindt, the development of a fictionalised script for her most recent film Tenant (2012) allows for a dramaturgical re-enactment of her own traumatic family history to take place. Staging and filming domestic scenarios to construct a visual portrait of the tenant of a family apartment, Schwindt presents a conflicted account of Mrs Schumacher, a communist who facilitated the travel of Vladimir Lenin to post-revolution Russia in 1917. Employing an ambitious sculptural visual language, Schwindt explores the construction of social relations and knowledge production through variously fabricated means of articulation.

Grace Schwindt, 'Tenant', 2012, HD video, 78m

While used to different ends, Schwindt’s methodology shares a similar logic to collaborative duo Pil and Galia Kollectiv’s argument that the dialectic of the stage can enable a repositioning performative expression. The collective’s theatrical modes of staging (both in moving image and live performance), are thematically based on the didactic agitprop theatre of early modernism, and borrow from the ideological aesthetic of Russian Constructivism. As invited panel speakers for Theatricality and Staging, the pair conceived the dialectic of the stage from the perspective of a post-Fordist worker, seeking to change the political hierarchy essentially at play in conventional modes of theatre, and evidenced in their own productions, Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet (2007) and No Haus Like Bau, (2008), among others.

In her edited text The Sensible Stage: Staging and the Moving Image, Crone underpins her survey of staging and moving image in contemporary art by defining the stage as platform for aesthetic transformation:

Staging becomes a means for re-thinking and re-configuring the relationship between body and image, between immediate experience and mediated information, between projected image and performed body, and between the stage and the screen.

But, in the context of the biennial, Crone’s focus on “staging” limits wider engagement with moving image practices working in the interstices of the screen and theatre. As Badiou determines, “theatre is when there is a public exhibition, with or without a stage.” A broader discussion should therefore incorporate an expanded appreciation of theatricality in film, video, and other modes of performative documentation – from the stage direction in Grace Schwindt’s recent works, to recordings of speech-based performances of Giles Bailey, video and performance artist Sharon Hayes and Cally Spooner, or the role of dramatic re-enactment in the films of Duncan Campbell and Emily Wardill, to name just a few. While the biennial cannot comprehensively include all aspects of expanded cinema practices, particular those operating between stage and screen, it is nevertheless vital to take a wider perspective on how ‘stage’ and ‘theatre’ are conceptualised across artists’ film and video, to bend the critical framework of ‘theatre’, ‘liveness’ in order for radical modes of performative representation to emerge.

Rachel Reupke, 'Containing Matters of no very peaceable Colour', 2009, video, 5m 11s

The stock image is an antithetical mode of image production. It is conversely ‘rich’ in resolution, yet also entirely dependent upon the Internet for aggregation and dissemination. Operating at the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum, the stock image emerges through online channels of distribution as the glossy counterpart to the poor image. It distorts physical perceptions through bland visual registers and proliferates across picture libraries of multinational agencies on a daily basis. The stock image can be perceived as an elite clip-art icon, frequently stereotypical and often ambiguous, vague in purpose and produced en masse to appeal to the greatest cross section of clients. Emptied of semiotic meaning, stock footage and photography is thus ripe for appropriation and critical interception.

Incorporating the indistinct strata of stock material, video and installation artist Rachel Reupke interrogates the dislocation between digital images and their subsequently signified physical objects. In her videos Containing Matters of No Very Peaceable Colour (2009) and 10 Seconds or Greater (2009), Reupke moves beyond the politics of image distribution mapped out in Steyerl’s text by presenting a clinical dissection of advertising syntax. The artist borrows heavily from royalty free stock footage that features banal depictions of everyday items, such as towels and bathroom tiles, as well as contrived scenarios featuring actors chopping vegetables. Her appropriation assemblages posit a critique of the latent commerciality of digital image production via a subversion of associations produced between image and sound.

Rachel Reupke, '10 Seconds or Greater', 2009, HD video, 15m

Bath towels, rendered in a spectrum of colours and textures, are the primary visual subjects in Containing Matters of No Very Peaceable Colour. Their visual arrangement is surreal and austere: they traverse the screen in neatly folded piles, while a text-to-speech narrator lists Internet search terms used to locate stock footage online. Latent associations with commercial photography are also evoked through Reupke’s choice of commodity. The artist notes, “towels are often used to dress a location for a shoot”, and in this way, Reupke performs a conceptual return: the dislocated virtual stock image is released back into the reality of its specific site of production. Her absurd arrangement of towels becomes the defining aesthetic of the video. It produces a reckoning with the artificiality of the stock image, where presenting differences (in textures of the towels, their ‘fluffiness’, their folded arrangements) enable the viewer to “understand something of the commercial message of the unseen clip”.

Differentiating the poor and the stock image is their relation to, or rather allusions of reality, engendered in the stock image by its clean visual strata, its hyper-real aesthetic. Yet content remains realistic, yet banal, and as a result, offer Reupke a range of creative opportunities. She explains, “it is a banal visual register that allows the literal representation of a difficult subject. And I am particularly interested in difficult subjects, or lets say embarrassing and mundane subjects – health, loneliness, general worry etc”. Reupke seeks to represent the “realness” of the stock image, or at least its capacity for ‘real’ representation, by divorcing it from its commercial usages. In Containing Matters of No Very Peaceable Colour, image is separated from sound, and the video itself is separated into distinct parts. The visual register switches from the conveyer belt of towels to a close-up of a woman drying herself. In turn, this figure (partially obscured by a Getty watermark) is incongruously followed by rapid zooms of marbled bathroom tiles. A disco soundtrack plays. Reupke shifts the viewer from a “highly constructed world of advertising and the imagination, and place them back in the real world at the end of the video”. The real world: amateurish photography of bathroom tiles, bouncing flashes, blurred edges.

Reupke’s clinical combination of generic visual data and distorted sound disturbs the reiteration of social stereotypes and lifestyle choices that are habitually promoted through popular media. She suggests the stock image can, in fact, be a significant point of departure, an opportune vessel within which new modes of representation and critical associations can be positioned. It is thus not only the poor, but also the stock image that conveys the condition of dislocated online existence. Through subtle manipulations, in both Reupke’s work, but also web-users accumulating, circulating and disseminating poor, compressed digital media, quality is transformed into accessibility. The accelerated economy of the digital image removes aesthetic concerns from the semiotic value of virtual appearances.

A Blurred Boundary is still a Boundary, curated by Shama Khanna, Friday 25 May, 4pm, ICA Cinema 1 (followed by Q&A with the curator) and Sunday 27 May, 4.30pm, ICA Cinema 2

Claire Hooper, 'Eris: The Path of ER', 2011/12, performance and video. Courtesy Hollybush Gardens

The telly is always on in the background. Always. Hollyoaks, Eastenders, drama all the time. At the end of the night, when you get back, it’s still on. TV drama tells the story of people’s lives, providing a point of contact with something that has been worked out ahead of time, so to speak. In close ups and musical cues, it tells its audience what and how to feel. TV drama is there for that apposite window of time when you allow yourself to listen to how you are feeling. Its narrative is a touchstone for emotional orientation.

Yet, the “story” of modern art has been one that has systematically discredited narrative as an organising principal. We don’t want to feel manipulated, we don’t want our stories narrated by others. We want critical distance from the work, but equally expect the work to reciprocate and not breach the line. It is only quite recently, and with the reluctant inclusion in to the art world of the stories of cultural others, that narrative has re-emerged in contemporary film and video work. In conceptualism’s wake, narrative was replaced by endless beginnings, repetitions and non-linear and spatial frameworks. The formal innovations that have come to be associated with the critical work from the 1960s and 70s, have become tropes that now signify rather than enact a critical precedence. There are two kinds of “critical”, and we privilege one over the other all too easily: critical, as in “critical mass”; and then there is the criticism of the art critic, of people like me, who wrap things up in words and take them into care. “Art is my priority. It’s my baby now.”

In tragic drama, the chorus sings the action before it happens. The platforms are split up: the choir’s voices transmit from above, the humans wait below. You see where I’m going with this metaphor, right? It’s just like TV.

Using the template of the story of Eris, goddess of strife, Claire Hooper’s latest work Eris: The Path of ER (which contains both recorded and live performances), tells the story of Danielle Marie Shillingford’s attempts to regain custody of her children. The children are the third generation of Danielle’s family to be brought into, and brought up within the British social care system. Half-way through the performance, Danielle finds herself trapped in a violent relationship. Her story, then, is both one of domestic abuse and an abuse of the domestic by the bureaucratic and managerial forces at play. The story is based on real events and Danielle plays herself on stage and on screen. But the work addresses how the event itself is always already part a story.

In Eris, events are impossibly caught up in narrative structures: there are the stories Danielle tells her social workers, and there are the statistical stories these social works have written into profiling Danielle’s character. Hooper’s work is also about the stories we tell ourselves as a society, the very old stories that are more proscriptive than reflective. The sizeable amount of documentary matter included in the work speaks to the way in which what occurs is already part of a story. Everywhere, language is both an inadequate connection to the event and part of the event itself. For Hooper, language has the future written into it and the past written out of it.

Eris’ major strength is the way it demonstrates how different forms of intelligence can be represented and mobilised. No matter how intelligent you are, repression (be it self-inflicted, institutional or interpersonal, and including the codes of representation) makes you stupid. Refusing narrative stultifies the imagination. Hoopers’ work functions in this context as a statement concerning critical action rather than reaction, a statement whose aim is to keep critique at the edge of art and world.

Drama exercises the intelligence, which eventually informs our notion of reality. Contrary to the negational and backward-looking logic of the postmodern condition, it is the experience of catharsis, rather than trauma that acts to rewrite and re-right our understanding.

To perpetuate a cycle, momentum is needed
In me there is a need
Once named that need gains weight
That weight is enough to spin the wheel.
I named that need desire
And desire named me struggle
What is written cannot be changed

Let us turn to the titular character. Eris’s origins are Babylonian. She is Discordia, the goddess of strife, daughter of Nyx and Athena. Her liason officers are the three fates. The cast also includes Lyssa goddess of rage, Erebos primordial darkness, Leto, Apollo, Artemis, and Metis – good council. Pain, meanwhile, defines Danielle’s experience. At one point, Pain is personified as a figure slouched over Danielle’s shoulders as she attends to the ironing.

In Greek mythology, Eris is excluded from the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. She is left out of the celebration, ignored by social conventions – conventions which still define our ideas concerning the ‘proper’ and ‘normal’ environments in which to raise a family. In her fury, Eris storms in uninvited and throws a golden apple onto the table. This apple is precious but it comes with a proviso: it can only be given to the fairest of the assembled goddesses who, in competition with each other, proceed to make promises that they can’t keep. Their greed leads to rifts and upset yet it is Eris who is blamed for setting in motion the events that lead to the Trojan wars. Hooper describes Danielle’s son to me as this golden apple: one that lays bare the vanity and conceit of those that stand for the institutionalisation and politicisation of cultural norms.

Eris, meanwhile, is also a father. She fathers war. In the video, Eris parents both the conflicts with the authorities and the conflicts on the streets in which her sons, literal and otherwise, fight like young Spartans. She is father and mother to the conflicted hope invested in the relationship with her abuser. I make this gender switch, modelling Eris as male, because perhaps it is accurate in some ways. Culturally, men have a monopoly on aggression, as they do power. Problematically, so it does in Eris. Rage, who is supposed to be the goddess Lyssa, is played in the video by a man.

In Hooper’s reconstructed myth, welfare authorities ‘foster’ the situation used to discredit Danielle’s appeals for her son. The wheel of fortune turns another generation. What is represented is the way in which the people in power (whose power is not of their own devising) palpably don’t believe in their own system. These are feckless, hopeless people and those who run the world.

Lives also have soundtracks and again these are un-retractable from the sense we make of our experiences. Hooper told me that, during the making of the film, Danielle’s experiences of the kaleidoscopic symmetries of love and violence produced a constant intensity of emotion that Hooper chose to reflect in the rapid patter of grime-flow within the performative element of the work. A MC-narrator accompanies the original musical score composed by Beatrice Dillon. Lioness’ contribution to Eris does the job of telling the story, but at the same time her lyrical meter performs the same task as the Greek chorus, providing a relational structure in which to create a present connected to a past.

Language has the future written into it and the past written out of it. Action begets cycles within cycles; the cyclical movement itself is fate’s mark, a disorientating whirlwind.

Narrative is my compass through Athenia.

Claire Hooper, Eris: The Path of ER, performance co-produced by Electra, Saturday 26 May, 9.30pm, ICA Theatre

William Raban, 'Wave Formations', 1977

The decade of the 1960s saw the contemporary exodus of film from the theater towards the site of the gallery (and an emphasis on screening situations); the beginning of an ‘intermedia’-condition; the permeation of boundaries between art and film; and the creation of hybrid filmic objects, installations, performances and events.

- Tanya Leighton, Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader

Biennials are marked by frenetic energy by which each achieves critical mass, before disappearing again. The LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images follows this format: an intense temporary platform for debate, education and celebration of the moving image. How is this temporary community sustained after the fact? Intensity of the biennial must be seen against an age of ever promiscuous moving images: images ripped, crunched, cut and copied online; dispersed; viewed on any number of media platforms. Is, in fact, the biennial the correct format for a celebration of artists’ moving image? Following my initial instalment posted this weekend, here I  flag up several historical precedents of artists’ moving image dependent upon specific sites or media platforms for critical effectivity.

Moving image and the cinematic has been a dominant preoccupation in contemporary art of the last 15 years. It is, however, by no means a recent phenomena. In the late 1960s and 1970s, artists’ moving image in Britain concentrated emphasis on moving image in installation alongside objects and performance in the gallery space. These forms were borne out a desire to critique mainstream cinema and apparatus.

In recent years, historians of artists’ moving image have observed a tendency to conceive of installations that use moving image as a recent phenomena. Andrew C Uroskie’s essay ‘Siting Cinema’ suggests that this historical myopia is not simply a consequence of lazy critics. According to Uroskie, a critical blindness to the history of artists’ moving image can be accounted for by its institutional promiscuity. By this, he means its lack of faith to one institution in particular, its “failure to establish itself solely within the institutions of the theatre or gallery, within the discourses of either film studies or art history”. He continues:

Rather, the difficulty of locating artist film-making in the aesthetic discourse of the 1960s and in the later discourses of art and film criticism is inextricably bound up with the difficulty of locating these practices within the physical, institutional or discursive space of either the art gallery or the cinematic theatre.

Key among those practices of artists’ moving image of the late 1960-70s that activated the relationship between gallery and cinema was ‘Expanded Cinema’. Expanded cinema sought to challenge the conventional viewing behaviour of mainstream cinema, and to produce not a passive spectator in a fixed monocular relationship to a single screen but an active participation with multiple perspective. These filmmakers sought an expansion of cinema beyond its conventional set-up. For filmmaker Malcolm Le Grice, expanded cinema represented:

The establishment of the third region of time/space experience as primary… where the material factors of the screening situation, the celluloid, the light, the screen and the duration of [the viewer’s] attention is clearly established as the first instance.

William Raban is a filmmaker who has produced work that can be considered both moving image installation and expanded cinema. Reflecting on his own work of the past 40 years, Raban has written that for his expanded cinema to effectively critique the cinematic apparatus it would ideally be presented in the context of the cinema.

I prefer to show all my expanded pieces (except for the installations) on a cinema screen when it is possible, because I think this reinforces the transgressive aspect of the films — making a more direct comment on cinema and its inherent conservatism.

Experimental video artist David Larcher’s Videovoid (1993) finds its radical criticality in a normative context of television. Televised in 1994, this work exceeded standards of brightness, contrast and colour causing, Larcher recalls, “quite a stink” with Channel 4’s technicians. Speaking specifically of television, Larcher expressed a desire to use electrons in the image (along with syncing sound) in such a way that it seems the cathode ray is about to explode. While Raban is concerned with the cinema assemblage, from projector gate to immersive architectural space, Larcher’s work is less concerned with cinematic architecture. Television is subject to the contingency of domestic life. Broken attention is a factor of its viewing behaviour. Videovoid, however, relies on a specific normative context of television for its effectivity.

But isn’t artists’ moving image more promiscuous than ever before? Even a 16mm short can often be viewed in a theatre, an artist’s website, Vimeo or YouTube. The digital file might be embedded in a lecture slideshow, downloaded to a mobile phone, played in a domestic setting on a television, or in a gallery installation accompanied by objects. These proliferating media platforms transform the original image through a multitude of contextual factors, including different encodings, media players, screen surrounds, or different placement in installation space. Anything can be converted into anything.

It has been well discussed by organisations such as Limited Langauge how online digital media produces new economies of interface and attention. Web media users are constantly hailed, solicited and invited to connect. Pop-ups, banners, sponsorships, product placements, interactive games are part and parcel of this media ecosystem. Facebook, Youtube, Linkedin – community management sites – today are the go-to for web marketing (Vimeo: “we don’t put ads before, after, or over your videos”). We are constantly invited to connect and this is not, as media theorist Jon Dovey writes, because media providers just want us all to play nice and have lots of warm friendships.

It is because they are seeking, in a crowded, transient marketplace characterised by a nomadic audience, to create brand engagement…. Our behaviour becomes data that can be sold on without our knowledge and then be used to maintain consumption in whatever segment of the long tail our habitus is identified with.

Where is the cinematic architecture online? Would reframing YouTube as an architectural space encourage an historical point of departure from the concerns of expanded cinema? How the viewer interfaces with the screen – the kinds of behaviour encouraged – must be reconciled with an idea of the webpage layout as cinematic architecture. I don’t simply mean online community forums as a gathering framework. On YouTube this would include filter suggestions on the right hand side, users’ channels (in some cases ‘curated’), comments at the foot of the virtual frame – a plurality of possible narrative adjuncts. Given the plurality of digital formats and viewing platforms, a formalist critique would operate on a micro-level, engaging, for example, with the specific qualities of moving image compression.

In a contemporary visual culture, one where images are constantly transformed, rewritten, re-cut, compressed as they circulate through immaterial networks imbibed by branding, curator Elena Filipovic’s characterisation of cinema in the LUX / ICA Biennial Reader as quintessentially immaterial, seems apt: “It is all about projection, flickering light, and ephemeral experience.”

Never before has artists’ moving image been so popular and yet so promiscuous. The flicker of frames is now the digital flicker of images passing by before our very eyes. Combined with Hlavajova’s view of the biennial as “unstable, always in flux”, artist’s moving image in a biennial context seems hazardously uncertain ground.

Tamar Guimarães, Tropical blow up, 2009, video, 4m 45s

“This is where it happened,” the two men at the beginning of Tamar Guimarães’s Tropical Blow Up seem to be saying. They point to a clearing amid the dense tropical vegetation. This image emerges from another, then disappears within the series of fades that make up Guimarães’s silent film. The artist found this image in an archive of Brazilian tabloid newspapers. Others like it emerge and disappear, interspersed with images of plants.

We found it where it happened, where it happened to be when we found it. The relationship between event and thing, paradigmatic in continental philosophy, is pulled apart in Tropical Blow Up. What happens is the thing, while the originary event – finding the scene of a crime, for example – is buried under an increasing density of invisibility: more vegetation, more time passing and arriving, more spaces emerging and dispersing.

This is a relational web: with each movement, with each new image, the image of the thing becomes more entangled in the undergrowth, while the thing itself gets lost. According to structuralism, this is how the world works – it is what the world is. Our very beholding and negotiation of it is a kind of entrapment. If the ‘thing’ is agency, imagination, freedom, or the power to criticise the structure effectively, it would be the same scenario – the scene of the crime.

But let me propose a counter reading, not of relation but of association. With association, the layers of imaging do not take us further from the thing; these layers deepen our connection to the thing via an intensification of our recognition of it. From here, we might pose a means of both reading the work of art and negotiating power structures, where each operates less as under-growth and more as a hardening and intensification; one with the power to answer the encounter, the happening, with our own acts of real-thingness; ones which could smash up the structure should we choose to do so.

Tamar Guimarães, Tropical blow up, 2009, video, 4m 45s

[Watch Tamar Guimarães’s Tropical Blow Up]

Tamar Guimarães’s Tropical Blow Up features in This Obscure Object of Desire or, “No Ideas Except in Things”, curated by Elena Filipovic, Saturday 26 May, 4.30pm, ICA Cinema 2 and Sunday 27 May, 8pm, ICA Cinema 1 (followed by Q&A with the curator)

17.51 JPW: Ogborn observes that within the film industry shorts are no longer a place for experimentation. Comer agrees, adding that funders increasingly see the short as a ‘rehearsal’ for the feature. This is a concern.

17. 46 JPW: Audience member asks “Is there an economic reason to encourage long-form artists’ filmmaking?” Maybe it is a conscious attempt for the artist to reach a longer audience. Rivers is interested in reaching a larger audience. Is there an element of subsidy for getting them into cinemas? Akomfrah: “Yes and no. You have to resort to different calculations.”

A condition of Akomfrah receiving money from the UK Film Council in the past has been that his work is ‘cultural’ rather than ‘commercial’.

17.44 JPW: Ben Rivers describes how Steve McQueen puts on different heads for Hollywood and the gallery. This, for Rivers, is unimaginable.

17.40 JPW: Why this dichotomy of long and short film? Akomfrah notes that Bauhaus made short and long-form films: “It was always an art historical distinction, rather than one made by filmmakers.”

17. 38 JPW: Ogborn: ” Every film needs a star. The artist is the star… Art is so hip… film feels old, bored and tired. It wants to reenergise itself by plugging into art and fashion.”

17.36 JPW: Stuart Comer: the nineties saw an explosion of Hollywood film cut up. The art world becomes a filter on the history of film, and the filter becomes a thing in itself in the art world.

17.32 JPW: Akomfrah is fascinated by how this debate has come about. There is a sense that if, as an artist, you produce long-form you are breaking a mold of some kind. Where is the mold? Chris Marker is a key reference in this debate – a signature figure. Marker’s work is always working across forms and conventions. We are so enamoured by Marker for his disregard of forms.

Chris Marker, 'Spiral' film poster.

17.29 JPW: For Akomfrah long-form was part of the process by which a sideways understanding of the canonical avant garde came about. Over the years Akomfrah has made more long-form films than shorts.

17.24 JPW: John Akomfrah speaks. The long-form was Akomfrah’s first exposure to cinema. Recalls attending cinema off the Fulham Road, Chelsea. Bunking in at 14 years of age to Pasolini and Rosselinni and “not understanding a fucking thing.” Only at college did Akomfrah see shorts: Brakhage, Frampton. Akomfrah was involved in screening artists’ film in many settings: classrooms, flats and community centres – there was no privileged cinematic site.

17.22 JPW: Comer: In the art world you can make a DIY film for nothing and sell it for six figures; feature films can be made for millions and each unit sell for £12.

17.19 JPW: Rivers explains that when producing feature films more money is involved and more consideration has to be given to budget. Mo’ money mo’ problems: increased budgets come with many more considerations. Rivers remains wary of professionalism in spite of the increased budget. How does the filmmaker retain integrity to his/her core values with budget increase?

17.17 JPW: At a screening of Two Years at Sea in Cambridge one guy in the audience huffed and puffed. When asked if he was okay he exclaimed, “it is boring! is there no voice of dissent?”

Ben Rivers, 'Two Years at Sea', 2011.

17.14 JPW: Rivers’ recent show at Matt’s Gallery screened Slow Action in anamorphic format. At Matt’s all aspects of the screening environment could be controlled: the right beanbags, colour of walls, headphones…

17.12 JPW: Screening in the gallery affords Rivers greater control over the viewer. Even when Rivers’ films were  screened in galleries he would send off material to film festivals.

17.10 JPW: Rivers describes a decisive moment where he scrapped story boards and narratives. He went out into the world. Length became a secondary consideration; duration was dictated by the form. Only later did the film find its length in editing.

17.06 JPW: The only route for Rivers was art school. In Falmouth at art school he produced sculpture and watched short films – these acted upon one another in these formative years. In the early years outside art school all Rivers wanted to do was produce narrative feature films. Comer asks whether Rivers’ early short films were stepping stones to making feature films.

17.05 JPW: Ben Rivers is represented by Kate MacGarry as an artist and currently has a feature in cinemas nationwide.

Andrew Kotting and Iain Sinclair in the swan pedlo.

 17.01 JPW: Kotting’s Random Acts is currently being screened: a fibre glass swan pedlo bobs in the brine.

16.57 JPW: Wearing is a voracious consumer of television. Rightly so, her film Self Made will be aired on Channel 4.

16.56 JPW: Ogborn’s other film is the collaboration between filmmaker Andrew Kotting and Iain Sinclair’s where the two take a swan pedlo along the south coast and up the Thames.  ”A gorgeous film” – Ogborn. An offshoot of the Kotting/Sinclair relationship has been the commissioning of several shorts for Channel 4′s Random Acts where guests are invited to pedal along.

16.53 JPW: Wearing’s film found diversified sources of funding. A discussion was had with Wearing’s gallery whether a freeze frame from the film could be sold as an editioned print.

 16.51 JPW: Ogborn is screening a clip from Wearing’s film Self Made. A woman on screen is being encouraged to throw crockery against a gallery wall. “Who annoys you the most?” she is asked. “People driving on their mobile phone.” “Okay, throw the plate at that person.”

16.45 JPW: Kate Ogborn is a producer who has worked in different roles within the moving image industry. Ogborn started at the BFI – a long time ago! Ogborn learnt about collaboration and facilitation at the BFI. Her time there gave her a freedom of approach and respect for the filmmaker’s vision that stays with her today.  The first artists long-form film Ogborn produced was Gillian Wearing’s Self Made. From the outset Wearing knew she wanted to show her film in a cinematic space and accepted she would need assistance in a world unfamiliar to her own – enter Ogborn.

16.43 JPW: Comer’s view is that the conversation on this subject tends to account for funding structures in the difference between mainstream and artists’ moving image.

16.40 JPW: Stuart Comer begins by stating that the subject of this talk is currently a live issue. After 20 years of multi-screen artists’ moving image with an ambulatory spectator we are witnessing a renewed interest in the conventional single-screen cinema as a space for artists’ moving image.

16.36 JONATHAN P WATTS: The doors have opened and the auditorium is filling steadily for this afternoon’s final talk at the LUX / ICA Biennial of Moving Images  Artists’ Long-Form Filmmaking. Tate Modern’s Curator of Film will be chairing a panel featuring filmmakers Ben Rivers, John Akomfrah and producer Kate Ogborn.

John Akomfrah, 'Handsworth Songs', 1986.

For the final talk of the biennial, Jonathan P Watts will be posting live updates of the Artists’ Long-Form Filmmaking  talk this afternoon. Curator of Film at Tate Modern Stuart Comer will chair a panel including filmmaker John Akomfrah, artist Ben Rivers, and producer Kate Ogborn. This is now the Biennial Reader describes the event:

A distinguished panel discusses the realities and practicalities of artists’ long-form filmmaking. With the rise of artists working in feature-length productions, questions of audience, sustainability and infrastructure are raised.

In light of this description, Live Journal has a couple of queries regarding the forthcoming discussion:

• In what respects has digital media enabled long-form filmmaking?
• Does artists’ long-form filmmaking sit comfortably within the cinema space?

Luther Price, 'Inkblot #13', 2008 and 'Inkblot #31', 2009, handpainted 16mm film strip.

Luther Price’s work is difficult, to say the least. Chairing the post-screening Q&A session on Friday 25 May, Assistant Director of LUX Mike Sperlinger characterised Price’s renegade attitude towards his chosen medium (both 8mm and 16mm film) as one that goes against the grain, doing things “one shouldn’t do” with film. This attitude is largely evidenced in Price’s physical relationship with film. Firstly, there’s the artist’s method of material mutilation: defacing the celluloid surface of his films with paint, scraping off the soundtrack or, with his Garden series, burying film reels in his back yard as rotting compost, so the abstract effects of bacterial mould decompose the celluloid strip and its images over time.

Price’s second act of rebellion is to deliver an intervention into the screening environment in which people sit. His preference for the projector to be present in the space, fortuitously permitted due to screening conditions at the ICA, insists upon a heightened awareness of moving image technology, with the intention to interrupt the (presumably) passive consumption of the analogue image by the viewer. As Sperlinger noted, Price’s audience is not only confronted with the “ecstatic violence” of these hand-made films, but also the physicality of film as an object, as it clacks through the gate. This is a machine that has its own unique sound, aesthetic and substance. Privileging the role of mechanical apparatus over the engendering of an illusionary viewing experience is a key element in Price’s abrasive aesthetic; the incessant drill of exposed sprocket holes running through the machine elicits a bone shuddering anti-soundtrack. The artist’s demands the viewer to not only perceive the projection of his films, but also feel its semiotic and aural affects through the core sensory faculties of our very own bodies.

Many other experimental moving image artists of Price’s generation, and earlier, share formal concerns for facilitating an anti-illusory experience, ensuring the viewer is conscious of the technology and artifice of film itself. In his interview with Thomas Morgan Evans, Light Industry’s Ed Halter posed comparisons between Price and“structural-materialism [among certain London filmmakers in the 1970s]”, and offered Lis Rhodes as an example. Halter’s co-director Thomas Beard also made comparisons with Stan Brakhage during the post-screening Q&A. But the contextual framing, representation and curating of Luther Price’s work at the LUX / ICA Moving Image Biennial invites speculation over intentionality – both that of the curators’ and the artist’s.

The hermetic nature of Price’s films – a product of their enduring insistence of non-narrative structure and explicit abstraction – encourages a reductive reading to take place. The artist’s biography, his ‘cottage industry’ methodology, is seen as the primary component of his practice, or at least appears presented as such by Light Industry. The physical processes of the film-making – working from a small lab in his domestic home, cutting and processing films “for less than $10” – engenders a fetishisation of Price’s handcrafted aesthetic, while also prioritising the degraded materiality of his films to emerge as the primary point of conceptual interest. Such framing supersedes the need to address the problematic latent visual content of the film, his appropriated yet aleatory “parent” material, as phrased by Beard.

As an aesthetic experience, the selection of films are, for the most part, visually spectacular, if not also a grueling endurance test of spectral abstraction and extreme sound. The colour frames in Turbulant Blue (2006) and the monochrome, abstract skeins of Inkblot No. 1 (2007) offer pictorial depth. Leaning over to whisper an aside mid-screening, my co-writer Thomas offered a comparison between the latter film and Guernica, as if Picasso’s grayscale canvas had been grabbed by both hands and shaken up to produce a chaotic, fluid mess of fissured lines and cracks. Singing Biscotts (2007) changes tempo through a meditative portrait of a gospel choir, where melody dilutes filmic repetition. But through his specific appropriation of ‘found’ material, it is worth foregrounding that Price does indeed make conscious thematic decisions: murky ethnographic imagery momentarily surfaces in After the Garden: Dusty Ricket (2007); shadows of female nudity punctuate Inkblot No. 44: Aqua Woman (2009); contrived melodrama is depicted in the conversely narrative-based A Patch of Green (2004). Significantly out of sync with the preceding films, the programme finale comes in the form of a 16mm projection where the image is removed. Light Industry chose to end the programme with Shelly Winters (2010), a 16mm film containing only the soundtrack, in which testimonies of “battered women” give verbal accounts of intense physical abuse suffered at the hands of their male partners.

As Thomas noted following a preview of the films on Friday, “Tied to the speed of projection, these films cannot help but violate the eye”. But these films are punishing. They test the physiological capability of the audience. In unpacking Price’s practice in the post-screening Q&A, Light Industry were quick to describe the film in terms of the body, where celluloid scraps are precisely cut open and stitched together, as if undergoing a surgery. Alluding to the corporeal quality to the film – the film as a body – invites connotations of editorial processes, where images are subject to addition, subtraction and change. The work is read through life cycles: redundant imagery is revived through editorial operations. But Light Industry appeared to be reluctant to take account of Price’s appropriation of imagery from other bodies. The question of pornographic footage in Price’s films from the 1980s, for example, was not only excluded in this curated programme (that Halter points out is a curatorship of himself, Beard and Price), but was also sidestepped by both curators in the public Q&A. This absence of debate made me wonder if there is a certain objectification of the subjects (re)presented in Price’s appropriated ‘parent material’.

Light Industry insist, and were careful to emphatically reiterate in the Q&A, that Price is no more interested in pornography than as he is to ethnography. As circumstantial subjects that are merely ‘found’ on the surfaces of celluloid, these apparently incidental images are the blank canvas upon which Price subsequently exerts a series of violations, manipulations and, albeit at times beautiful, abstract aesthetic. But in receiving these images as a viewer, in being subjected to the incessant physicality of Price’s films for over 80 minutes, one must consider, firstly, the ethics of appropriation, and secondly, how Price’s latent subject matter is occluded by a curatorial framing process. In these instances, how should one read or attempt to access these other phantom bodies and subjectivities that, whether fictional or documentary, are relentlessly incorporated into Price’s ‘chance’ 16mm exquisite corpses?

Attempting to reconcile the ethics of appropriation deployed across Price’s prolific practice must be left somewhat incomplete, particularly in the context of the biennial in which Price’s work is represented only by a singular 80 minute programme screened on two separate occasions. The practical limitations of screenings  naturally omit a fuller range of material from the artist’s career. But Price is also physically absent here; he is not present at the screenings to vouch for the intentionality of his films. Absences such as these culminate in the positing of a critical vacuum, compounded by the omissions of Price’s curators who fail to fully account for the base content of the work at hand. By attempting to swerve criticism through disavowal of latent exploitation, by covering the chinks in their conceptual amour, Light Industry’s gaps in the representation of Luther Price opens up a chasm for further scrutiny, diverting attention away from Price himself, to instead expose a deficient curatorial framework.

Significantly, the notion of appropriating “parent material” is twofold, here: present in the base celluloid of Price’s films, and also reflected in the proposed relation between the elevated artist for review, as well as his curators. Coming in with a incomplete lexicon with which to validate or at least substantiate the artist and his practice, Light Industry indeed risk appearing to treat Price as their own “parent material”, using his films as an aesthetic primer onto which their own curatorial agenda can be traced.

Nine Films by Luther Price, curated by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, 6pm Friday 25 May 2012, ICA Cinema 1 (followed by Q&A with the curators) and Saturday 8.30pm Saturday 26th May 2012, ICA Cinema 2.

A Reply to Amy Budd

June 1, 2012 · by Ed Halter

I’d like to offer some response on behalf of both Thomas Beard and myself, to Amy Budd’s editorial. In general, I think it’s wonderful that editor Isla Leaver-Yap has published a piece from one of her writers that is critical of a Biennial screening, and so I do want to applaud that attempt to create something more than the normal celebratory discourse that one finds within the art world, particularly in commissioned writing.

However, I was disappointed by Budd’s negligence of standard journalistic practice and her poorly constructed argumentation, which, in the end, leaves me perplexed at what she’s ultimately trying to say. This piece would have benefitted greatly from some fact-checking and a second draft, and I don’t believe the quick turnaround that the Live Journal format requires is enough of an excuse. All published writing about an event becomes a de facto record, and so the writer needs to understand the ethical dimension of her role, taking particularly seriously the responsibility to report the facts correctly. I would have been deeply embarrassed to publish something with so many factual errors that could have easily been corrected with just a few questions to the organisers from LUX, the ICA, or the curators under consideration.

After Budd’s piece was first published online, I sent an email to Leaver-Yap noting a number of the errors – Budd’s original misspelling of “Brakhage,” for example, or the misrepresentation of Price’s Turbulant Blue as a painted film, which indicates Budd’s carelessness in her note-taking – and these two mistakes were later edited out. Budd also quotes Mike Sperlinger as saying that Price does things “one shouldn’t do” with film, when in fact it was I who said this.

More egregiously, Budd states in her second paragraph that Price has a “preference for the projector to be present in the space”. However, this simply isn’t the case. Neither in our public statements during the two Q&A sessions at the Biennial nor in any written materials we provided did we say Price prefers the projector to be present on the theatre floor. In fact, Price’s films were projected from the booth in the ICA’s smaller film theatre the next day for the second screening. Following this gaffe, Budd then goes on to say it is Price’s “intention to interrupt the (presumably) passive consumption of the analogue image by the viewer”. Of course, as an aspiring critic, she may wish to speculate that this is Price’s intention, but she should present this view as her own theory, since this not something we indicated in interviews, written statements or our public Q&A sessions, nor information she could have found from any other source available. I offered my own interpretation of the effects of having the projector on the floor in my interview with Thomas Morgan Evans, published two days earlier on the Biennial’s Live Journal, and repeated this interpretation during the Q&A. In neither forum did I suggest this was the artist’s intention for the work; I think I am correct in assuming that a normally attentive reader would have read my statements as such. Again, basic fact-checking would have caught this mistake, but instead it now serves as the leading point of an entire paragraph of Budd’s argument.

For the rest of her editorial, Budd goes on to say, “the physical processes of filmmaking…engenders a fetishization of Price’s handcrafted aesthetic”. There’s a sloppiness in the subject-verb construction here, since I don’t think Budd means to say that the “physical processes” themselves would “engender a fetishization” (as if automatically!) but the real problem here is the clichéd use of “fetishization,” which I’m a bit baffled by. What kind of fetishization? Marxist? Freudian? Anthropological? I would guess she really means this in less specific sense, trying to say that we as curators paid an inordinate or even irrational amount of attention to the physical processes Price uses to create his work. Well, this is certainly a matter of opinion, but I feel she would do well to forgo the use of dramatic but vague theoretical buzzwords and try to state her ideas more concretely in the future. As far as Thomas Beard and I were concerned, our goal was to communicate to the viewers how these films were made, since their process of production differs so greatly from the manner in which films are normally constructed, and we feel the nature of their making to be significant – this is a far from unusual way to speak about art work.

Later, Budd makes pains to point out what she deems “the problematic latent visual content of the film, his appropriated yet aleatory ‘parent’ material”. She states, “one must consider [author’s stress], firstly, the ethics of appropriation, and secondly, how Price’s latent subject matter is occluded by a curatorial framing process.” She concludes with a mention of the “latent exploitation” she thinks might be found in Price’s work. These are perhaps the most confusing statements of all, since “latent” normally means that something is present but unseen, or more specifically, inherent but not yet expressed. So “latent visual content” in this context seems self-contradictory – are there unseen visual elements in Price’s films? Subject matter that’s there, but does not in any way come visibly to the surface? And if there is subject matter we can’t see, how can it be exploitative? “Latent visual content” could only mean something like an undeveloped photographic negative; the images in Price’s films are at times obscured, erased, or abstracted, but they are not latent. What “latent subject matter” or “latent exploitation” would be is anyone’s guess. If she is using this term metaphorically, then it’s not clear what she means by it.

Even if we ignore her repeated misuse of the term “latent,” Budd still raises a question and then fails to answer it. What, exactly, is exploitative about the subject matter that we do see? She asks, “How should one read or attempt to access these other phantom bodies and subjectivities that, whether fictional or documentary, are relentlessly incorporated into Price’s ‘chance’ 16mm exquisite corpses?” but then does not attempt any such analysis herself. She points out a few images – the anthropological footage used in Dusty Ricketts, the “shadows of female nudity” in Inkblot #44: Aqua Woman – but fails to offer any theories about why or how these images would be exploitative or would raise ethical concerns. If “one must consider…the ethics of appropriation” then why doesn’t Budd follow her own directive and do so?

The most Budd offers is that “the absence of debate made me wonder if there is a certain objectification of the subjects (re)presented in Price’s appropriated ‘parent’ material,” but she never gets beyond this wondering. Her main complaint seems to be that we didn’t present a reading of the work she would liked to have heard. I feel her time as a writer would have been better spent offering her own analysis of the material. The ethics of using appropriated documentary film footage, either by Price or in general, might be something interesting to discuss. Yet Budd decides instead to leave the reader hanging, invoking this potentially complex idea just long enough for finger-wagging purposes, then dropping it before she says anything substantial regarding what she thinks.

From Budd’s account, one would never know we did, in fact, address the content of his films in our presentations, though we didn’t frame our reading in terms of exploitation or ethics. Since I happened to record both Q&A sessions, I listened to the first one again and transcribed a few things. At one point in the discussion, I stated the following:

For him, the film and body are intimately connected […] Thematically, his work is obviously also about the body, about families and about life cycles, and about living and dying. All those things that happen to bodies. So the formal concerns of the film material, and the thematic ideas that are in the sound and image, are things that are working together.

Budd paraphrases something else one of us said in the Q&A: that, in her words, “Price is no more interested in pornography than as he is to ethnography.” (Copy editing aside: “as he is to”? I think one would be interested “in” pornography rather than “to” pornography.) Here, she misconstrues a statement made by my colleague Thomas Beard. This was in response to a question by Stuart Comer, who asked why we didn’t include any of the work Price has made with pornography. As I mentioned in the discussion, we had planned to include one work that featured pornography, but at the last minute it was unavailable, and so we switched it with another. Quoting from my audio file of the discussion, what Thomas actually said was this:

It’s not so much the case that Luther is interested in porn per se. In the same way that, with the Garden films, he’s not really interested in, say, ethnography as a form, so much as it is that these are kinds of junked material, things that are orphaned. Of course, there are other reasons why he would be dealing with pornography as a kind of found footage.

I took Thomas’s statement to mean Price isn’t a filmmaker particularly concerned with pornography any more than he is with other found materials—they’re simply one kind of film among many that he uses, all of which constitute the motley 20^th-century archive that is 16mm junked footage. Therefore, the fact that we didn’t show any films with pornography in them wasn’t a major impediment to understanding Price’s recent work as a whole. In the discussion, I said “it’s just one thing he does,” and when planning the shows, “he wasn’t intent that it needed to be here or not”. I again stressed that, for the artist, pornography isn’t any more central to his work than other kinds of footage he uses. This isn’t to say that the use of pornography isn’t significant to his work. Since Luther is an openly queer artist and has been since the beginning of his work in the 1980s, it would be naive to assume that there isn’t a political dimension in his use of explicit images of gay sex in his films. At the same time, he doesn’t feel that his work can be reduced just to this aspect of it, and Thomas and I agree with this.

Had we been able to do a number of programs, as we did at the recent Whitney Biennial, we could have shown a much wider range of works by Price, but even our three Whitney programs couldn’t show everything. At the ICA, we were happy to provide a single-program sampling of some of the things he’s been doing in the last decade. It simply wouldn’t have been possible to cover all that he’s done. As it stands, one could read Budd’s editorial as a complaint about the exploitative nature of a film she’s never seen, and wasn’t included in the program, which would be a particularly strange kind of criticism!

The final aspect of Budd’s polemic I’d like to address is her insistence that Thomas and I were “covering the chinks in [our] conceptual armour” based on what we said in a ten-minute, improvised Q&A session, that we were therefore “using his films as an aesthetic primer onto which [our] own curatorial agenda can be traced,” and that our “gaps in the representation of Luther Price opens up a chasm for further scrutiny, diverting attention away from Price himself, to instead expose a deficient curatorial framework”. It’s hard to take these charges seriously, given that she’s largely basing her culminating argument on part of a single answer uttered at one screening, and fails to take into account anything said at the second session, or in our written materials. She also notes, “Price is physically absent here” but had she followed up and gone to the second screening to hear what we discussed then—or at the very least took the time to inquire – she would have learned that Price wasn’t in attendance because he does not currently own a passport, and therefore can’t go overseas. This is due to the fact that he travelled to Nicaragua on a cultural exchange mission during the US-backed war in the 1980s. Nearly shot to death by machine gun fire, he was flown back to the States by the US government for an operation that saved his life; afterwards, that same government charged him $5,000 for this service. Until he pays it and over 25 years of interest accrued on the bill, his passport won’t be released to him.

All Budd’s talk of “armour” and “agendas” sounds very exciting and conspiratorial, but I’m afraid we think about what we did in more practical terms: bringing an artist’s films to London that otherwise couldn’t have been screened there, and offering a critical account of the work as we see it. I agree Price’s work is rich with possible meanings that were not exhausted by our discussion, and there is much more that could and should be said about it. I would have rather read more of what Budd thought the content of the films might signify, rather than be subjected to an ad hominem attack on our supposed intentions as curators, posed by a writer who didn’t even bother to get her facts straight or follow through on her own ideas.