Event: Recalling the Cinematic

Blair French

This is Christa Blümlinger writing on the work of Stan Douglas following the occasion of a major retrospective of his work that has remained lodged in my consciousness in the eighteen months since I viewed it:
‘The gesture of appropriation is expressed in an almost systematic way [through Douglas’ installations], usually on two levels: on one level, it is about taking the cinematographic out of the cinema and into the exhibition space; on another, individual films or film fragments are shifted into a new territory of meaning through the form of material appropriation, of the citation, pastiche, or remake.
This acts as a neat summation of a more general appropriation of the cinematic by video installation, one usefully kept in mind when considering the Event: New Moving Image Works exhibition.
Involving singular moving image works by just four artists—Angelica Mesiti, Kate Murphy, Elena Näsänen and Mel O’Callaghan—Event sought to draw out shared approaches underpinning the works, in particular the structural and experiential bases of each in cinematic conventions. In spatial and aural manners this occurred through the interlacing of works across relatively open gallery spaces. This facing-off of images, occasionally intrusive bleeding of sound and expanses of gallery floor for walking back and forth between works could not be less cinematic in its shaping of or appeal to viewer experience—at Artspace there is no pre-determined pathway down dimly lit corridors linking hermetic black box to hermetic black box to hermetic black box. But video installation is necessarily at odds with itself, indeed doomed in any ambition to create a sensorial ‘event’ for the viewer, one that lays claim to and lingers in the intelligence, if it seeks to somehow replicate or transplant the cinema into the more open spaces of the gallery—spaces into and through which people move concurrent with the on-screen event. So in looking to the cinematic in these works, it must be simultaneously to points of reference (even substructure) and reactions (even departures).
By no means, however, did Event with its modest accumulation of material look to extrapolate general conditions of any cinema/video installation conjunction from discrete works. In presenting figures in performative actions—on occasion individual, other times collective; some conveying narrative structure and purpose, others more circular, even random; some providing the central, driving temporal core of the work, others woven into more complex and diverse aggregations of visual material but always in considered relation to place (and its histories)—all the works simply shared an attitude of experimentation with regard to various structural narrative tropes and in particular ‘shot’ conventions sourced in cinema. All four artists created video and film work for installation encounter that drew on, and/or disrupted those conventional cinematic rhythms that are as deeply acculturated (or ‘natural’) as spoken language. For example, again and again across the installation space we might have noted instances of cinema referenced as a structural blueprint for conceptual video action. The use of looped narrative or thwarted narrative was a key feature, as was engagement with extended performance (whether the filming of extended performance or the post-production extension of performance). Clear attention given to the choreography of bodies through space—both the space of the ‘setting’ and the space of the frame—was revealed again and again. These are formations we—an art audience—have become accustomed to in video installation. We might also have long comprehended their basis in early post-object and conceptual art documentation of performance acts. However only over the past decade or so have video installation’s genealogical roots in filmic and early cinematic experimentation begun to be properly acknowledged and critically examined in depth by artists, curators, writers and audiences alike beyond narrow fields of moving image specialisms.
The exhibition was distinguished by two further avenues of relation between cinema and its shadowing in the realms of contemporary art. The first involved the manner in which in these works the artists borrowed certain grammatical structures from cinema in order to create an experience of estrangement, both of their characters from one-another and their visual environment, but also between an audience and character, setting up a form of detached yet compulsive fascination on the part of the audience member.
The second, and, within the context of this exhibition, most compelling, lay in the extraordinarily strong memory traces evoked by particular cinematic shot conventions: the lingering, forensic, close-up; the empty highway rolling beneath the camera; the single figure framed wide-shot in the landscape; clusters of figures moving across the long shot screen or away from the camera with unknown purpose. Each encounter with such shots—and there were many other examples—flooded the viewer with both visual and experiential memories; with points of familiarity and emotion; with a sense of having been here before. And it was this deep acculturation of the cinematic as both trace and presence of the event that lay at the heart and impact of all the works presented within this project.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the work of Finnish artist Elena Näsänen, invited by Artspace to produce a new work during a three-month residency over the summer of 2008–09, her first visit to Australia. Näsänen’s work has long utilised and extended the structural and psychological conventions of cinema to draw audiences into often self-conscious but compelling acts of witness. Her work evidences a relentless fascination with the manner in which the camera ‘looks’, and how subjectivity and character are psychologically constructed through conventions of viewpoint and shot—not just represented subjectivity but also that of the viewer. An interest in cinematic narrative also plays out across her practice, often in resistant or disruptive relationships involving, for example in an early film Before Rain (1998), the re-staging (appropriation) and editing together of various transition or pause scenes from cinema classics so as to examine what lies in the spaces between significant narrative activity—what part does cinematic ‘downtime’ play in the development of character and the psychological environment of film? Or in Drive (2003), where the relentless non-narrative circular structure of a woman’s drive down a snowy woodland highway is placed under constant barrage by a soundscape recalling familiar road scene scenarios of acceleration and violent crash.
Figures in Näsänen’s works undertake enigmatic, even circular journeys, in which compulsions to quest are pressured by a sense of unease. This is particularly felt in Waste Land, the new work produced on Lake George in New South Wales for the Event exhibition. At base level the film features the gathering of five women of varying ages on the flat plains of Lake George (the opening shot is from high above the lake, classically framed by foliage, with the women appearing as if from nowhere as tiny figures in the shimmering distance). United by some form of common but unspecified purpose they move deliberately across the lake and up through surrounding bush. They are wary of observers, including an overhead helicopter signalled via sound only, and by extension, of us as we adopt positions of lying in wait before them, or sidle along in the mid-distance or zoom in to scrutinise expressions—all of these serving on this occasion to visually glorify the questing women, to give them the kind of cinematic swagger associated with the underdog hero.
A kind of schism between place and action eventually opens up in the work. The action is of place but not specific to it. The environment is rich both historically and in scenographic terms, but appears somehow one stage removed from the figures, withdrawn into the wings as it were, as if the pictorial space were an autonomous and independent of the figures as they are of it. There’s a rupture in temporalities also, between the event time of the women’s actions—a fleeting presentness—and the deep time of the environment (which ultimately, by implication, they are linked to in the final gesture of cutting the chain bolting a wire gate as if under the cover of night they are about to break into some facility to perform an act of protest or resistance, perhaps in the name of the environment). And there is always a sense of alertness, an emphasis on faces, on watching and the condition of being watched.
Waste Land simply stops. The women cut the chain, the sound of its metallic separation synched to the sudden cut to black of the film—both a violent refusal to resolution and an invitation to psychological projection on the part of the viewer. The film ends. In installation format it loops to the beginning, but this transition is forced by the mechanics of presentation rather than incorporated within the structure of the work itself (and here a further and most significant contrast to the artist’s earlier Drive.)
In the Event installation, Waste Land faced Mel O’Callaghan’s To The End (2008)—a work with a very different relationship to narrative progression and temporality. To The End features a single male figure, slightly scruffy in appearance, walking across vast swathes of mudflats, simultaneously isolated yet engaged in communication via a walkie-talkie. He appears to have little sense of origin or destination—to be both perplexed and even on occasion distressed. Sometimes he sinks a little further into the wet surface and struggles more to walk, at other moments he almost strides along. Occasionally he pauses to look about or turn. The camera shots are relatively static, whether close up upon the figure or picturing him from an elevated distance where the surface of the mudflats stretches out across the image frame like a painted surface offering little in the way of geographical or narrative coordinates. In fact, the camera is positioned at different spots of Mont Saint Michel in coastal France, offering 360-degree views of the mudflats. The figure is unaware of the exact position of the camera and is responding to directions given over the walkie-talkie by the artist from her elevated position. The mudflats are known as being a confusing, even dangerous location and thus the figure is literally, not simply performatively disoriented. Aurally accompanied only by repeating, melancholic piano melodies the figure appears trapped within an unstable, changing environment portending threat, but also within the space and in the moment of the image (the event)—a sense ultimately heightened by the work’s random chapter sequencing, effectively consigning this figure to perpetual on-film wandering.
O’Callaghan’s figure carries himself around in a vast open space with a degree of awkwardness, buffeted by the elements (wind) and somehow at odds with place—a perception heightened by the random, disjunctive changes in camera positions. By contrast the figures in Kate Murphy’s Rehearsal (for Saint Vitus) (2007) are utterly focused upon a physical articulation of place through movement—dance—in-synch with an overt choreography of various camera angles (Murphy works here with static camera shots, but constant, rhythmic sequencing of the shots both within each of the three screens and across their relationship). Murphy is best known for video works that examine the construction of subjectivity for, by and within moving image contexts, in particular documentary contexts grounded on shared social assumptions regarding the veracity of documentary, or more crudely the analogical relationship of camera to ‘real-life’. The works often have an emotional intensity focused on language or on subjects’ relationship to representation (including their represented selves). Rehearsal, however, is silent. The ‘language’ component of the work involves four grey-clad dancers’ bodies in motion—‘bodies’ as the dancers’ faces are barely glimpsed within the piece. In the final work that takes the form of a free-standing triptych of rear projection screens—a sculptural (or furniture-like) presence—the dancers enact a series of movements in response to (or choreographed by) the specific environment of a Dublin church: its worn carpet patched-up with odd off-cuts and mended with duct tape along with the humble objects that furnish it (pews, kneelers and a confessional box). A piece of tape in the form of a cross becomes a landing pad for the dancers feet; a criss-cross pattern of tape allows the dancers to hopscotch through a frame; a dancer does a cart-wheel over a patch of blue carpet, the other dancers follow; a confessional box acts as a supporting wall for two dancers performing a double handstand. Slowly the video images fade from one screen to another introducing sections of carpet and furniture suggesting that a dance is going to take place, but the audience never gets to see the completed piece, they are witness only to the preparatory moments, the moment before the event.
Whereas the other works in the exhibition focused upon a single set of actions within a single location or environment (even if that was a vast open space such as Lake George or a set of expansive, tidal mudflats), Angelica Mesiti’s The Line of Lode and Death of Charlie Day (2008) meshed together a set of locations, scenarios and mini-narratives in a overall work that doesn’t so much travel along a readily identifiable and singular narrative path (other than its beginning in bright light driving along an outback highway and ending at dusk) as involve a cadenced accumulation and impressionist patterning of imagery through which a temporal momentum is generated. Of all the works in Event it is probably also that most deeply steeped in place, evolving out of multiple visits to the mining town of Broken Hill in far-west New South Wales. The Line of Lode and Death of Charlie Day interlaces scenarios produced by the artist in response to different aspects of the town’s history and folklore: its outback location that has been a ubiquitous presence in television, film and advertising representations for a number of decades; its mining history; its Indigenous past and present; its social make-up; the relationships it engenders between people and land. The work references but never collapses into the black hole of the location’s over-representation. Establishing shots driving the outback highway and cruising the wide, empty, sun-bleached streets of the town itself both acknowledge a lineage of the road movie genre without being seduced by its faux-romanticism. Equally the famously an frequently featured wall and ceiling paintings of Mario's Palace Hotel (think Priscilla, Queen of the Desert), painted by local Aboriginal artist, Gordon Waye (erroneously credited as ‘Charlie Day’) are set in new relation to their environment and its history of immigration and cultural dislocation via Mesiti’s lingering shots of a live goat standing patiently on the hotel staircase landing, surrounded by garishly opulent landscape scenes. Just as significantly, occasional shots of circling flocks of birds that through visual convention impart a sense of freedom, but also as ‘flight’, disturbance and enforced migration, find a particular substance in their relation to the local Marnpi dreaming story of the bronze-winged pigeon that conveys the origin of the rich mineral deposits in the region.
With a structure perhaps akin to a ballad (with repeated recourse to key visual ‘choruses’ and reinforcement by a highly evocative soundscape), appropriate given its basis in immersions within folklore, The Line of Lode and Death of Charlie Day concludes with an extended sequence featuring local Broken Hill children cycling down a road at dusk with remarkable metallic silver ‘feather’ clocks flowing in their wake. It’s impossible not to be reminded of the cycling scene in E.T., but this soon fades from consciousness as this beautifully augmented daily ritual (kids mucking about on their bikes) is cinematically transformed into a poetic expression of the bond between people and place.
In bringing these works together, and in subsequent reflection on them, I have kept close to a conception of the moving image work as ‘event’ that yokes past and present tenses, sometimes seamlessly, often with a form of clashing disjunction. The cinematic bears multiple event status: the event of the shoot (action); the event of post-production (creation); the event of installation (encounter). Experience of and meaning from the cinematic are found in the nexus of these, and yet simultaneously in the works of Ivone Margulies (again writing on Stan Douglas), always in the film’s ‘hold on the spectator’s present’.
First published in Column 3, edited by Reuben Keehan, published by Artspace, Sydney, 2009
© Artspace and the author.

Christa Blümlinger, ‘Remake, readymade, reconfiguration: film as metahistory’, in Hans D. Christ and Iris Dressler (eds), Stan Douglas: Past Imperfect, Works 1986-2007, exhibition catalogue, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2008, p. 31.
All were represented by a single work except Elena Näsänen whose major new work shown in projection format, Waste Land (2009) was supplemented by a monitor presentation of an earlier work Drive (2003).
For a more detailed discussion of Elena Näsänen’s work see Sarah Hetherington’s essay ‘Journey through a barren place: a reflection on Elena Näsänen's Waste Land’ in this volume.
Rehearsal was shot while Kate Murphy was on residency at the Fire Station Artists’ Studios in Dublin, Ireland. She chose this church as site for both production and first installation of this work in response to an invitation by Irish artist, Linda Quinlan to produce a piece responding to the Dublin suburb of Ballymun, which was going through a regeneration process at the time. (The commission came under the umbrella of ‘Breaking Ground’—the percent for art program for Ballymun Regeneration Limited, Dublin.) Elements of the preceding description of the work have been adapted from the artist’s own notes.
For a more detailed discussion of Angelica Mesiti’s film see Melody Willis, ‘Angelica Mesiti: The Line of Lode and Death of Charlie Day’, unpaginated exhibition brochure, 2008.
Ivone Margulies, ‘Stan Douglas’s clear and present strangeness’, in Christ and Dressler, op. cit., p. 155.