Martin Rumsby
RIGOR ACADEMIS
And even I can remember
A day when the historians left
blanks in their writings
I mean for things they didn't know
Some months after a preview screening of my video LANDSCAPISM in Wellington I was surprised to read, in ILLUSIONS #40, (Winter, 2008) Laurence Simmons reporting Sam Rodhie's assertion that,
There is no film genre called landscape,
as there is in painting.
Yes, just as the sun revolves around our flat earth.
I know, for example, of fully developed
landscape genres within the avant-garde cinemas of Australia, Canada,
England, and the United States, not to mention occasional forays into
the field by experimental filmmakers in both France and New Zealand.
And I am sure that a deeper study would reveal further instances of
landscape filmmaking in Asian and European film and video art.
Whilst the neglect of experimental
film by media academics comes as no surprise it is nonetheless disappointing
that academics are so estranged from our media artists. And not just
for the sake present-day practitioners, but for the future of our art
and culture and even the life and integrity of our academies.
What of the poor student, financing his or her study on a student loan, who wishes to study how ideas from our visual and conceptual art practices may have found a corresponding vision in our media arts?
It is not just neglect, an ignorance of our media arts actually amounts to repression. The denial of a native body of work and its international correspondences represses the practitioners, those who would study them, and the wider knowledge of our culture. Because our media artists are cut off from their own history they are forced, to some extent, to constantly revisit a wheel already invented. The metaphor that may be best applied to the truncation of our media arts is that of thalidomide. At least the Nazis exhibited some of the work that they rejected. Here it is met with an indifferent silence. This does not speak of open inquiry, generous exchange, and the discourse that the academy may have once represented. A media arts culture is comprised of something more than the collected press releases of a Film Commission and two television networks.
Although not comprehensive the background study for LANDSCAPISM could provide an introductory model for such discourse. A start needs to be made. I therefore offer this scanty review in the hope that some of our media arts academics will pick up on it and offer a fuller and intellectualized account in the pages of all those forthcoming books on New Zealand art and cinema which have heretofore so completely ignored the achievement of our film and video artists. I apologize beforehand to those worthy film or video artists that I may have overlooked.
What is it to make a landscape film? The province of a provincial yokel ensconced on a haystack retelling bawdy farmyard rhymes or could an artistic interest in landscape speak to themes of perception, consciousness, locale, and culture? Simon Schama tells us in LANDSCAPE AND MEMORY (1995):
Landscapes are culture before
they are nature.
Or, as the psychoanalyst Geza Roheim
concluded from a study of Australian aboriginal rites.
Environment is regarded as if
it is derived from human beings.
Landscape art tells us how we see the world, the land and our place within it. It is about us and how our thinking determines how we see.
... once a certain idea of
landscape establishes itself
in a certain place, it has a
peculiar way of ... becoming,
in fact, part of the scenery.
It is not a matter of standing in awe before nature but, as Susan Sontag stated in THE AESTHETICS OF SILENCE, an expression of the widest goals of consciousness extending, in Modernism, so far as to sometimes function as the antidote of consciousness, evolved from within consciousness itself through various transgressions and transformations.
For the Canadian film artist R Bruce Elder (1985) notions of consciousness are inherently related to ideas of process in art.
Any cinema that wishes to deal
with the experience of the moment
must not offer description; rather
it must reveal how things come into
experience.
In this way being and passing may be synonymous in time.
Consciousness implies the burden of self-consciousness - consciousness being consciousness of consciousness which may lead to reflexive art works, that state an awareness, positioning themselves within art and cultural history. The artist not only draws but is also drawn by what they draw; 'man' and 'environment' are both made up in a consciousness that may, in some way, be the body of the world. For others, the question has been how may technology refine or extend our consciousness?
An artistic interest in landscape
is as much an interest in art history, aesthetics, thought, and practice
- folding the landscape before us into culturally specific systems of
seeing and thinking. Chris Kraus (2006) articulated it this way.
There is the modernist myth that
the work of art exists in a
transcendental vacuum and if the
work has sufficient power it will
move us on its own terms and
transport us into another state.
The belief that the object itself
has that kind of power. Increasingly,
now the power is created and put
upon the object by the system, by the
art world, by the critics, by the
curators. It becomes extremely
referential. Nobody in art school
can do anything original anymore.
Whatever they do has to, in some
way or another, reference part of
the history of art ... art doesn't
exist apart from the larger world.
It is very much a part of the larger
world.
Whilst landscape has played an important part in the history of New Zealand painting and sculpture, it has not figured so prominently in our moving image history. Certainly the land has provided a scenic backdrop or highlight for our feature film, advertising and tourist promotional industries. The landscape is employed and exploited for its economic, rather than spiritual, significance. A view that was challenged in the opening shot of Lee Tamahori's ONCE WERE WARRIORS (1994) in which the camera pulls back from an idyllic view of rural New Zealand to reveal it as an advertising billboard facing out on a highway that intersects a Polynesian ghetto. Probably the most radical internalization of the landscape as a marker of personal psychological states in New Zealand cinema is George Rose and Richard Adam's little known expressionistic masterpiece THE SADNESS OF THE POST INTELLECTUAL ART CRITIC (1979). Here landscape is an arcadia, an escape from the repression and anguish of the social world.
Generally, our experimental landscape
films have been photographically based, personal documentaries, each
maker working in their own distinctive style, largely unaware of what
their contemporaries are doing. Although they can rarely be seen as
practitioners working within a scene their basis in documentary may
be seen as encompassing a resistance to the hegemony of mass market
forms of cinema in a topographical mapping of land and thought.
JOANNA MARGARET PAUL
The Hamilton born painter and poet Joanna Margaret Paul (1945-2003) took up a movie camera and embarked on a series of modest personal films made mostly on the home movie format of Super 8mm in the early 1970s. Her means, equipment and technique were low budget and primitive. Much of her film work seems exploratory, as if seeking the same type of compositional clarity with moving images that she had been able to bring to painting and poetry. Paul never sought to titillate an audience but instead aimed to speak directly to us from her inner self, through cinema. What we see in the arrangement of her images is the workings of her consciousness - how her mind puts things together in free flowing connections between the encounter of self with place.
Between 1970 and 1982 Paul made almost 40 experimental films. Paul's single-person cinema varied from personal documentary to lyrical landscape to ritualized performance in work that sometimes spoke of the domestic situation of women. Her films laid bare her close attention to the world, simply illustrating her love of land, nature, friends and family, mediating a space between interior and exterior realities, between life and death, between culture and nature.
As Paul herself said of her film work,
It was the mythopoeic&clumsily
extended aspect of my paintings
in 70/71 which first turned me
to filmmaking ... I also enjoy
the abstraction possible with
the camera ... & the gter (sic)
resistance to the purely
subjective offered thru that lens. (www.vuw.ac.nz/staff, accessed 11/06/2007).
Within the history of New Zealand
experimental filmmaking Paul's simple films are akin to those made by
Marie Menken in New York from the 1940s to the 1960s.
Paul liked to work at home in a modest manner,
I have never needed a studio to
work in ... I am trying to
capture an idea from life ...
my work originates in feeling ...
I like to avoid investing things
with a symbolic meaning ... I
want my eye to be a fairly clear
lens on the world. Things always
have a lot to say to me, so I like
to think they have something to
say through me.
(O'Brien, 1996).
Paul's landscape studies were neither
simple recording nor random assemblage. Working from shooting scripts
composed on sheets of music paper she used her camera to explore landscape,
hoping that her camera eye may evoke a dream state that would help to
discern hidden patterns, rhythms and meanings in nature. Seeing her
artistic activities as being intimately related to the processes of
everyday life Paul often portrayed the people and places that meant
most to her.
Her major landscape film is probably PORT CHALMERS CYCLE (Super 8mm, Colour, Silent, 4.3 or 5.4 minutes, 1970).
THE PORT CHALMERS CYCLE is divided
into a series of sections, each section separated by white leader. In
the first section a hand-held camera swirls through a landscape dotted
with houses, stopping to pick out details - the Port Chalmers Railway
Station, a church, the rooftops of colonial villas, overgrown gardens
and blooming flowers, washing drying on a clothes line - all markers
of human activity and cultivation. Paul here records a particular landscape,
a suburb, at a particular time. There is something rural and rustic
about this overgrown suburbia, something that anticipates the old cars
and the old people that we see later in the film.
Our view at the beginning of Part
Two is framed by windows, indicating that this is the subjective view
of the filmmaker as well as formally referencing the photographic or
picture plane. The shots are slower and steadier than those in the first
section of the cycle. The motif of clothes drying is repeated, solitary
figures and a couple move through streets that are virtually devoid
of human activity. Paul's New Zealand seems lonely, desolate and isolated,
a probing commentary on Paul's then role as a housewife and mother.
It is Paul who seems alone, desolate and isolated in this landscape,
her position seemingly so marginal as to take a camera to it.
Part Three of the cycle is a hand-held point of view
shot as the film artist walks along a path (the only pedestrian) next to a roadway along which various cars travel.
Part Four is the most remarkable, evoking both the minimalism of Japanese calligraphy whilst also anticipating later developments in the paintings of Ralph Hotere and Colin McCahon. (Who both, at various times also lived in the area). Paul mixes modernist and regional concerns in cinema in the same way that McCahon and Hotere did in their paintings. We see titles, numbers and names written in stark contrasts of white on black, like chalk on a blackboard. Words are photographed stenciled onto various industrial materials such as iron and wood, shipping containers and railway wagons, all interspersed with glimpses of the landscape.
Finally, we see a boat (an empty vessel, maybe symbolic of the human body), a house, picket fence, chimneys, more clothes drying on a line as traces of an uneasy human presence that has altered the land.
For Paul it seems that our human,
particularly European, presence here is tentative and temporary as we
leave passing markers of our industry. We are shadows, her vision is
of an alternative reality. She looked for significance in little things
to infer a spirituality underlying the domestic details of the everyday,
I'm interested in the
experience that goes beyond, for
instance, the landscape. It's
something you can read in abstract
or spiritual terms as well as in representational terms.
(O'Brien, 1996).
One gets the feeling, in looking at her films, that Paul consciously chose her images, isolating what she thought were important. She struggles with the camera and editing process trying to establish a poetic unity, or interconnectedness, between herself, the world and the viewer. I get the idea that her work was exploratory, that she was trying to capture or evoke an immanence that she sensed in nature. Paul may have believed that in the particulars of Nature, or close scrutiny of Nature, one could discern an immanence of the universal. For her, then, her consciousness was tied to Nature, consciousness is Nature. To read consciousness is too read Nature. To read rationality is to read humanness. Rationality, dualisms separate us from Nature.
PHILIP DADSON
Intermedia artist Philip Dadson also engaged the land in various media including film, video and audio, employing various artistic strategies for his landscape studies that often stress the unity of humans with nature.
For his 12 minute long 16mm landscape
film EARTHWORKS (1971) Dadson traveled with some others, including filmmakers
Geoff Steven and Leon Narbey, to the North Island's volcanic plateau
where they filmed a slow camera pan at dawn around the landscape until
the camera froze up. Dadson's aim, for this piece, was to bring something
of the concerns of land art to film. The main elements of the film are
the landscape, the camera pan around that landscape and fragments of
audio simultaneously recorded at eight international locations giving
detailed reports on local light conditions, climate and vegetation at
a precise instant in time. As an extended moment of synchronicity the
finished work comprises audio by geographically dispersed artists recorded
at 1800 hours GMT on the Spring Equinox set against the image sequence
that was also shot in New Zealand at 1800 hours GMT on that same day.
It had a lot of conceptual layers
to it ... dealing with the notion
of earthworks, which, at the time,
was a sculptural form ... I wanted
to do a piece that was using the
earth in a planetary sense ...
It was about communications ...
people doing physical reports on
their being in a particular place
at a particular time, all the same
time, all over the world.
(Rumsby, 2005).
EARTHWORKS is as much a landscape film as performance, post-object and land based art that was current in the early 1970s. Particular landscapes were identified as sculptural materials by land artists. Notable works of land art included Robert Smithson's SPIRAL JETTY (1970) in which the artist made a (non-utilitarian) jetty in the form of concentric arcs extending into a lake and James Turrell?s RODEN CRATER (1972 - ongoing) which involved excavating a volcanic crater in Arizona and modifying it as a giant camera obscura. Dadson's concern with communication sets the landscape against the human ephemera of Short Wave Radio, anticipating the Internet and Cell phones. EARTHWORKS is interesting in that it is a semi-sculptural work that did not alter or transform the site it occurred at. It as if it is positing that we try and embark on a new relationship with the land, one in which we can co-exist with nature rather than attempt to dominate or control it.
Following a residency in Antarctica
in 2003 Dadson produced a series of landscape based sonic video works
titled POLAR PROJECTS that were exhibited as installation works.
For AERIAL FARM Dadson manipulated a few short camera pans up and down an array of transmission aerials during a blizzard at Scott Base in Antarctica. The black outline of the aerial against the white background makes it appear almost as a sketch on paper, but a sketch that moves. As the weather deteriorates the aerial forms are enveloped by snow, they seem to advance and recede in two and three dimensions, creating visual ambiguities for the viewer who may then find themselves beginning to question the nature of appearances and relationships between individual perception, cultural constructions and nature.
STONE MAP is a more performance based work in which Dadson spins and swirls through the Antarctic landscape at twilight with a hand-held camera, subjectively mapping a field of stones. We witness the artist's experience of a pristine nature in a relationship mediated by technology. In this case it is electronic photographic technology as Dadson performs an elaborate camera dance that suggests he is invoking the direct, unmediated experience of nature and of living, perceiving and creating in the moment. Dadson sees something redemptive in his ecstatic immersion in the landscape and the work seems to invite the viewer's full immersion in it as well. The artist experiences nature whilst the viewer experiences an artwork. Can the viewers immerse themselves in the artwork to the same degree that the artist related to nature? In doing this then are we turning away from the land to look, not at it but at ourselves?
Dadson's CHTHONIAN PULSE (2004) references forces that well up through the land, positing humans as part of broader forces.
DARCY LANGE
Darcy Lange (1946-2005) worked
for many years on a series of recordings of work that anticipate video
surveillance. Bringing a sense of humanism and social concern to his
work, Lange documented people at work, featuring the landscapes they
work in, showing something of the human presence in the land along with
technological interventions that help to shape the land as an economic
force. Lange's extended take videos, recording in real time; capture
the rhythm of everyday life, or at least the rhythm of life in his time
as opposed to the past and possible future rhythms and experience of
time. His is the time of our time or as our time was some time ago.
Lange (2001) himself said of his English factory studies,
The studies became performance
analysis, they searched the
monotony of the work, they
questioned the work load and
the suffering due to the work,
and they became a kind of
uncomplimentary social realism.
To which David Curtis (2007) adds,
As recorded they are remarkable
for their neutrality and empathy.
For Lange work was sanctified and in work we may discern certain fixed truths.
Part of the impetus for Lange's
work may have arisen from idealistic 1960s concerns for social renewal.
Locating himself as a servant of his culture Lange straddled the boundaries
between art, politics, and society, creating a realism in which art
forms are congruent with the real world. Eschewing the artificial constructions
of montage formations as anti-naturalistic Lange 'composed' his shots
in depth (shots in which all the compositional elements are in focus)
as presentational works which would not violate the integrity of 'real'
space and time. To experience, within art, things as they really are.
Writing of Lange's work the American artist Dan Graham said,
If one assumes that the dominant
media attempt to impose upon the
public their own framework in
which to interpret the present,
one which stifles popular memory,
then Lange's videos, films and
photo books attempt to reconstruct
another popular historical memory
in order for the oppressed to
glimpse a moment of their real,
recent past.
(Cited in Lange, 2001).
A series of Lange?s work videos shot in New Zealand in 1974 document aspects of the agri-industrial process from tree felling, to fertilization, through milking to butchering. Although Lange's primary interest was to document people at work, to record those not normally afforded media representation, landscapes found their way into his studies and, as such, are interesting in showing both figures in the land as well as the way people shape and work the land and put it to use for themselves.
One of the New Zealand work studies
in which the landscape features prominently is VERN HUME, AERIAL TOP
DRESSING TARANAKI, 1974, study in three parts. The first part shows
five trips recorded from inside a topdressing aircraft with Mt Taranaki
as a backdrop. Each trip is filmed from a different camera viewpoint.
Where a conventional film may seek to instill dynamism and a sense of
action by inter-cutting backwards and forwards between the various viewpoints
in a montage construction Lange would have none of this. His work is
durational, a variation on what his contemporaries, the so-called structural
film artists, were doing in America at the time and, in some ways, anticipating
aspects of the later work of James Benning. Nor was he involved in the
process of radically altering compositions and landforms for the sake
of aesthetic balance and harmony. He did, however, have concerns about
how a camera may be appropriately mounted and so experimented with variations
of camera work from fixed tripod view, to fluid head, to hand-held.
Next, he recorded three trips from the ground, the camera following
the aeroplane on its topdressing circuit. Finally Lange recorded the
lunch break, where the three men involved in the land fertilization
process - the pilot, farmer and videographer, come together and commune
over lunch where they discuss and compare the relative merits not of
the land, their work, nature or art but of PLAYBOY and PENTHOUSE magazines,
a humorous pun on their land fertilization activities.
Lange's rural background, (he grew up on a diary farm in Taranaki), instilled with a Calvinistic work ethic at a young age, probably factored in his direct, unsentimental objectifications of work and land. He saw a pragmatic relationship between humans and the land they live on and work, though he did, often, struggle with the nature of his video representations:
Perhaps the invention of mechanical reproduction, the camera, was a
result of a desire to reproduce, but
then perhaps it is a device which
strips people of their spiritual
prestige. Are we meant to reproduce
exactly? Are we meant to destroy the
poetic approximations which existed
before the realities of science?
(Lange, 2001).
If Lange had some sense of spirituality
then it existed outside of organized religion, his sense being that
God was in nature and can therefore only be perceived in our relation
with nature,
The more you work to understand nature
in yourself the more logical it is to understand nature and to work for the preservation of it, so to create more
of the religious connections with it.
(Lange, 2001).
Here we could maybe substitute
the term consciousness for Lange?s conception of God or Nature.
Any relationship that we form with nature, however, must be, according to Lange, tempered by a respect for indigenous beliefs and rights filtered through the template of indigenous knowledge. To this end Lange worked, between 1977 and 1980, on his Maori Social, Cultural and Land Project hoping that his work could become in some way, like that of the painters Colin McCahon and Tony Fomison before him, a bridge between the competing notions of New Zealand and Aotearoa.
I feel this work is and always will
be ongoing. It is only the essence
of New Zealand - or Aotearoa - or
Aotea New Zealand Roa.
(Lange, 2001).
The perception of Lange's work
seems to be changing over time. It has shifted from artistic social
activism to anthropology. If Lange's view was somehow determined by
his childhood in 1950s, rural New Zealand, in which large populations
of Maori remained within traditional tribal areas, with the expectation
of full employment, that situation, was changing around the time he
was making his videos. Despite the great influx of Maori urban migration
from the 1950s onwards and increasing unemployment throughout the 1970s
and 1980s, Lange's work remained predominantly rural and can today be
seen as representing a different time and reality. But for all his social
realism Lange's work is as much conceptual and idealistic.
JANINE RANDERSON
An interest in forms of landscape art has not been confined to Nineteenth and Twentieth Century New Zealand artists. Younger artists, such as Janine Randerson, continue to work with landscape forms.
VIEWING FLOOR (Installation, 2001) brings to mind surveillance technology and culture as a camera repeatedly pans across a high-rise urban landscape. Here landscape is seen as a site for surveillance, a variation on earlier topographical concerns of colonial era landscape artists. The uniting factor here probably being the notion of property, ownership of land, control of land and behaviour on that land. It also raises questions of who is watching and why? It is surveillance technology functioning almost as a technological conscience to limit errant behaviour. But after the initial surveillance, what happens to the recordings, what does it all mean and where will it all go? Maybe, Randerson suggests, surveillance images could eventually be put to use in art or archival works.
SKYVIEWS (2001) continues Randerson's
paranoid musings on technology in urban landscapes. This electronic
image loop comprises a view onto downtown Auckland from the Skytower's
revolving restaurant in which the image is electronically doubled and,
almost imperceptibly, speeds up. Randerson uses the building itself
as a dolly, mounting the camera on the revolving Skytower floor. As
the view evolves from day to night the electronic soundtrack hints at
mechanical failure, the doubling visual effect seems to go haywire -
the machinery has become a Frankenstenian HAL (IBM), taking on a mind
and life of its own beyond human control and influence.
This theme is repeated in another DVD loop, ENDLESS COLUMN (2003) shot from an elevator on the outside of a high rise building. Once again the machinery goes crazy and the elevator starts going up and down at random, never getting to the bottom or the top, trapping us inside.
Here an autonomous machine comes to life, threatening our very existence. It is almost a Freudian resurrection of the repressed as the technological unconscious takes over. Thinking that technology may gain mastery over us we have become afraid of that which we have used to gain mastery over the world. Is this what Nature or God, if their consciousness in any way resembles ours, think of humans? I submit that deep down, far below the surface, what we really fear is ourselves.
What horror can be greater than
an army of monstrous dogs - led
by a human intelligence.
(Patchen, 1961)
Shifting from 'single channel' to installation works, Randerson reflects a wider movement away from, say, purely cinematic or sculptural works toward Intermedia, works which are neither purely cinematic nor sculptural. Intermedia artists may employ looped (rather than edited) moving images, electronic effects and image manipulation, multiple projections and split screens dispersed like sculptures throughout an art environment or hung like paintings on a wall.
Despite her embrace of technological forms of representation Randerson seems ambivalent about technology, countering a major impetus of modernism, being a fascination with technology and willingness to exploit it as a utopian medium. There seems, in contradistinction to that, to be a continuing stream of conservative Romanticism running through New Zealand art, manifesting itself in a puritanical suspicion of a technology that needs to be kept under control in the name of conservationism. Though the question arises whether what we have or are is really worth conserving.
OTHER VOICES
Working in the Auckland, Bay of Plenty and East Coast regions during the early 1980s Simon Buckle, who now lives in Gisborne, created several semi-abstract Super 8mm landscape films. Often including Maori titles and subject matter Buckle subjected his image progressions to direct film interventions, by painting on, scratching and otherwise manipulating his footage. Shooting his subjects in single frame Buckle would later project his work at either 1, 6 or 8 frames a second. (Standard film projection speed being 24 frames a second for sound and 18 frames a second for silent films). In this way Buckle could stretch out what would normally be a two and half minute film to 20 or minutes in length. An economical film artist he successfully presented his work in bars, clubs, lounges and alternative screening venues around Auckland.
In recent years a new voice representing indigenous readings of landscape has arisen in our media arts
where, according to Maree Mills (c2007),
An oral culture is being
actualized into a visual
one.
Mills is referring to the evolution
of the idea of New Zealand into Aotearoa, being a society that embraces
Maori cultural and spiritual values as its foundation.
Mills' own work POUREWA (2006) addresses New Zealanders' relationship with the land, metaphorically lamenting the carving up and economic desecration of what is, for Maori, consecrated ground. Describing Rachel Rakena's ANIWANIWA (2006), Mills goes on to tell us:
ANIWANIWA references a homeland
lost by the damming of the mighty
Waikato River. Submerged vessels
communicate the analogy of
cultural loss.
Rose-Michelle Lee?s video installation
TE WHATU O POUTINI (2007) and Natalie Robertson?s UNCLLE TTASMAN:
THE TREMBLING CURRENT THAT SCARS THE EARTH (2007) also address issues
of self and environment from an indigenous point of view.
These artists introduce a specific Maori political aspect as authentic and therapeutic in intention as was the avant-garde. The extent to which such work can be accommodated within the neo-avant, or postmodern, framework, or how it straddles that critical divide, remains to be seen.
The increasing ubiquity of low cost moving image production and digital imaging equipment extending as far as video capable cell-phones and You Tube are further democratizing the medium, making it virtually accessible to all, thereby creating a widespread moving image culture which may be described, in a positive sense, as 'folk'. Another example of this ubiquity is the phenomena of small scale, localized, independent moving image exhibitions such as the Hamilton Underground Film Festival. Indeed, the 2007 Hamilton Underground Film Festival featured four landscape related works such as Adrienne Grey's TAKAPU PART II and STEVEN STANLEY'S REVENGE by David Normal as demonstration that interest in landscape extends beyond the arena of 'high' art.
For Hamilton based Emit Snake Beings
(www.circuit47.com)the landscape functions as a psycho-geographical
space harking back to the esoteric strangeness of an archaic Celtic
Druidness, as yet another carrier of the English tradition into New
Zealand, albeit a repressed, occult tradition. In Snakebeing?s ALCHEMICAL
PILGRIMMAGE (2002-2008 ), for example, geography and topography are
subject to human perception and interference, to forms of disembodied
psychic possession incorporating notions in which authority is replaced
by mystery and the everyday becomes supra-natural. ALCHEMMICAL PILGRIMMAGGE
documents the journey of three monk-like figures as they make their
way to a broadcasting antenna at the summit of Mount Te Aroha on New
Zealand?s North Island.
Drawn to the microwave transmissions, as subjects of an imperial broadcast, the monks perform a ritual employing magical technology to counter the mind-numbing rays emanating from the television transmitter.
Snakebeings also performs in films
such as Carlos Pla?s MONK (2008) (Search PLABENTOS on YouTube) in
which a shrouded figure attempts to navigate a small boat through a
rural backwater. Related in theme to ALCHEMICAL PILGRIMMAGE, the early
Twentyfirst Century reality is again presented as being mediated by
wireless messages which functions as divinations of an other.
Pla, a Uruguayan engineer who emigrated to New Zealand in 200. , was inspired to take up filmmaking after attending the Hamilton Underground Film Festival in 200 .
Also working out of Hamilton, Joe Citizen's recent
MEAT (C2008) finds a likely setting
for his vision of gothic horror in the New Zealand landscape.
Other emergent ex-Hamiltonians
include Kiran Dass, Campbell Farquhar, and Thom Burton.
Taranaki based media artist Peter R Wareing has also produced a number of landscape based media artworks. In (d-2), (2007), one of four videos shot on the western Taranaki foreshore, we see a landwscape split in two, as itself and it?s out-of-phase mirror. A camera tentatively records the intersection of land and sea, the meeting of place and self and their attendant separation from each other. Wareing depicts a Freudian split, with actions on each side of the screen echoing each other as the schism of self and society. He seems to believe that our rationality and social conditioning splits us from the deep-seated knowledge and intuitions of our natural selves. Wareing?s artistic rituals, played out in the landscape, suggest a way of bridging these schisms, of reconnecting with ancient selves, ways of thinking, and apprehending. The title of his Super 8mm film FROM TIZIANO VECELLO TO BARNETT NEWMAN AND BACK suggests Wareing?s visual arts bias ? locating his work within the history of the visual arts rather than within narrative or documentary forms. The film frame is divided in half, one side being an aerial depiction of the Taranaki coastline, the other of a man walking along the foreshore. We hear the sound of automobiles, and a human voice, possibly that of a fairground announcer, coming from out of frame. The split frame reminds us of paintings such as Barnett Newman?s elemental ONEMENT ONE ( ), an art historical connection which is reinforced as a hand picks up paper reproductions of paintings. The artist is at the intersection of culture and nature, an intermediary returning to his homeland after experiencing international metropolitan culture. He experiences a split, a separation from culture and nature, between regionalism and internationalism which he seems unable to negotiate. Towards the end of the 3 minute and 43 second long film the waves appear to e breaking in reverse, unforming, as a deconstruction of nature suggesting that Wareing may wish to turn back time to go back to a time before this disjunction of culture and nature.
The promise of technology is greater accessibility implying a wider diversity of genre and a greater number of practitioners. We can therefore, within this context, expect more experimental films as the tradition moves from high art toward a popular folk art. Resistance to experimental film may then be relocated from it being found to be elitist to it being too pervasive amongst the general population.
Members of the Pictorial Research
Group in Wellington have utilized technology as a compositional determinant
in works such as NZ A RANDOM GEOGRAPHICAL SURVEY (1997/98). Here a computer
was used to select twenty random geographical locations in New Zealand.
The filmmakers then traveled to these locations and filmed them.
In THE SEA Part Three (no dates available) the Pictorial Research Group render the sea and shore sensually to suggest New Zealand's status as an island nation as well as ideas of humans having evolved from the sea.
The relationship between visual art and experimental film has also been asserted in a number of films made by members of the Pictorial Research Group. OTIRA (1999) establishes a link between experimental filmmaking and the visual arts by cinematically revisiting the Otira Gorge, site of a series of seminal New Zealand landscape paintings by the Nineteenth Century artist Petrus van der Velden.
In BOWL ME OVER (1995) Lissa Mitchell,
a member of the Pictorial Research Group, produced a scratched and hand
painted direct film animation of an art historical journey through the
South Island, invoking the spirits of the New Zealand painters Rita
Angas, Colin McCahon, Mina Arndt, and John Gully.
Kathy Dudding?s THE RETURN (2007),
a regional landscape film made in Wellington, incorporates personal
subject matter and renders it in a cinematic reworking that evokes the
New Zealand landscape photography of Robin Morrison.
Aucklander Nova Paul has produced a series of technical landscape exercises, such as PINK AND WHITE TERRACES (2006), derivative of earlier cinematic three-colour separation studies produced by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill in Australia. One hopes that these studies will lead Paul to a creative insight that will allow her to build on the Cantrill's precedent, maybe in the direction of three-dimensional colour separation studies.
Despite the regular pronouncements
of the ?death of cinema? which I have been hearing since 1980 there
has instead been an increasing world-wide movement into forms of expanded
cinema. These being film projection, installation, performance and intermedia
events that extend our notions of cinema into real time and space. In
SONAR REALDID INTERIOR (2008) Sam Hamilton created an installation environment
at the Film Archive in Auckland. Hamilton?s work, a virtual ecological
system in itself, was made up of audio that he recorded in the Amazon
jungles of Brazil, Colombia, and Peru. The spectator, entering the environment,
makes their way through a jungle of dangling wires, creeping power cords,
audio players, and fungal, flowering speaker cones. Finding a clearing
in the gallery environment the listener is surrounded by jungle sounds
? an audio illusion of a tropical rainforest playing out in an urban
industrial space. One asks about ones expectations of art and the ways
in which art and entertainment may transport us to other places and
states of mind, as escapism, evocation, or engagement.
WIDER ISSUES
As ideas about land and thought and as the human relationship with nature evolves then more possibilities of new landscape representations will arise. There is no fixed point that we look from or toward. The landscape can, in fact, become a ground upon which ideas about art and life are overlain and then reexamined to see how easily they, and we, sit upon the land and to what extent they can be built on.
Critical fashion will at times
dismiss both landscape and the avant-garde as passé Nineteenth and
Twentieth Century notions. People, working in music, painting, sculpture
and film, however, continue to work in these areas. Landscape is a genre
and tradition that has, as the art historian Francis Pound suggested,
admitted many different approaches. Writing about New Zealand sculpture,
Priscilla Pitts (1998) stated that New Zealanders are:
... inescapably confronted with
conflict and debate over ownership,
usage and access to land and ...
are conscious of divergent views
about land, landscape and nature.
The New Zealand project privileges the social above the intellectual or aesthetic. Things here seem to have to have a meaning. To be rooted, and grounded, in some (common) sense of reality.
A subjectivist artist such as the
American Stan Brakhage may contend that if we perceive in an active
and engaged way then art can help us refine our perceptions and understanding
of the world. That if one can access one's 'natural' vision then one
can find the 'design of one's life.' His project in art being a marker
of consciousness. Consciousness being, in relation to ideas of representation
and perception, a central concern of art. But what place for consciousness
within a non-conscious entity? An entity we are increasingly withdrawing
from as we retreat from the landscape through the mediascape to a cyberspace
that fills us with us much fear as nature does at its most malevolent.
Though this fear of our constructions is really the fear of ourselves,
a horror at our emptiness and capabilities as well as a terror that
what we make will come back to haunt us in our own image.
The question is not: do we
believe in God? but rather:
does God believe in us? And
the answer is: only an
unbeliever could have created
our image of God; and only a
false God could be satisfied
with it.
(Patchen, 1961)
This false God, according to R Bruce Elder, is technique.
Our inability to even conceive
of what we have lost under the
aggrandizing hegemony of
technical culture, is a measure
of the extent to which we are
dispossessed of any other realm.
We have lost our wonder at the
gift of things, at what should
be the wonder of wonders, that
things are given. Consequently
we have become oblivious of
values.
(Elder, 1985).
Elder calls for us to find a focus of our being other than willfulness. He suggests this can be found by attuning ourselves to what is revealed to us by something other than the ethos of technocracy. An other that can be experienced in our direct relationship with nature. Art based on such experience must not offer description; rather it must reveal how events come into experience, how being may be becoming.
Narrative, the child of technocracy,
cannot do this because, according to Elder, it is nothing more than
reminiscence. A narrative looks back from the end to the beginning,
organizing the past into comprehensible structures...
Eliminating the unmanageable
ambiguities and the painful
contradictio
experience.
(Elder, 1985)
According to Elder (1998) modernity has stressed unitary explanations through narratives that stress notions of historical continuity. Other philosophic and poetic conceptions of time and experience have been rendered obsolete by an exclusionary mechanistic vision that privileges technique.
It is not the landscape that we seek to reconcile ourselves with through technocracy and its attendant economies, but ourselves splayed out across an environment that we have forcibly domesticated and narrated, a factor that, each in their way, the American James Benning and New Zealander Darcy Lange have addressed in their work. Their differing approaches being partly medium specific and partly aesthetic.
The difference between Benning and Lange points to some of the differences between film and video art. At a practical level, film being more expensive, mechanically ungainly and subject to photochemical processes requires more pre-visualization, pre-planning and technical precision than video does. As evidenced by Lange's work, in video one can just point and shoot before organizing the material in an almost disinterested way.
Within the intellectual framework laid down in American avant-garde cinema Benning has been one of the few Americans who have sought to integrate both social subject matter and an indigenous (Native American) viewpoint into his work. Lange has ideas too but his ideas exist prior to the work rather than being imposed upon it as formal structuring devices.
Benning is unique, as a regionalist
who ascended to the centre (before relocating to Los Angeles), producing
durational photographically based work, like the Canadians Michael Snow,
Joyce Wieland, Jack Chambers, Ellie Epp, and David Rimmer, and incorporating
social subject matter as both socio historical material and intellectual
structuring devices. Whilst photographically based work is common within
the American avant-garde cinema, American and European film artists
have also excelled in forms of graphic and direct (camera-less) films
whereas such work is a rarity in both Canada and New Zealand.
Something that Canada and New Zealand share is an idea of independent cinema based on government film units partly instigated by the Scotsman John Greirson. These corporate entities posited the realist social documentary as a nationalistic form resistant to the hegemony of Hollywood. Such units prioritized the social good over the individual, emphasizing the individual's role within society and stressing collective values. More independent and personal cinemas arose in both countries after the introduction of television resulted in less funding and power for these units. The independents who replaced them, filmmakers such as Merata Mita, Peter Wells and Shereen Maloney in New Zealand, were less naturalistic, addressing a topography of diversity in race, sexuality and culture. Theirs was not a homogenous corporate straightjacket but a more inclusive vision that may broaden the terms of debate around values of common understanding. What the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (2002) calls a relative type of,
Individualism of self-fulfillment
... grounded in a principle of
mutual respect.
Taylor sees a danger in popular culture of a trivialized notion of subjectivity collapsing into a moral subjectivism that denies the possibility of an authentic background horizon underlying human life. By authentic background horizon Taylor means a value, such as Christianity or socialism, which fixes the individual within society rather than a notion of authenticity rooted in subjectivism. All things being equal for the subjectivist, Taylor claims, then significance is accorded only to choice, the choice of what is significant to the subjectivist. But a reality in which everything can be equally significant threatens to reduce all to insignificance. Robert Hughes (1997) calls this a politics of identity, reflecting a shift from modernist concerns with essentialist notions of (at times apocalyptic) purity, universalism and the absolute being to a sectarianism which sees the self as the victim of received ideas amounting, in social relations, to abuse. Hughes cites the American Barbara Kruger as a practitioner of such work. For Taylor we need to think and act in acknowledgement of an understanding that something independent of will shapes our lives. Society necessitates, according to Taylor, a substantive agreement on value. Artists, being in conversation with society, are tasked with articulating notions of diversity within frameworks of value. Though that value may be no more than the history of art or the internal requirements of a particular work of art (and its context).
The agent seeking significance in
life, trying to define him - or
herself meaningfully, has to exist
in a horizon of important questions
... Only if I exist in a world in
which history, or the demands of
nature, or the needs of my fellow
human beings, or duties of
citizenship, or the call of God,
or something else of this order
matters crucially, can I define an
identity for myself that is not
trivial. Authenticity is not the
enemy of demands that emanate from
beyond the self; it supposes such
demands.
(Taylor, 2002)
In art, such a value may be the supra-human. For Taylor, getting to the supra-human, through the agency of some background horizon, would be undertaken as an act of faith. Whereas for the Australian Robert Hughes,
What counts in art is the
multi-
individual who is more
complex than his or her
origins, and who can speak
to the complexities of others.
(Someone like himself, maybe).
(Hughes, 1997)
R Bruce Elder, Donald Kuspit, Charles Taylor and Robert Hughes could all be termed 'old-school' thinkers, grounded in modernism. The transgression postmodernism poses these thinkers of art is that it does not seek to disrupt or transgress toward renewal at all. Their importance to me is that they represent a New World type of thinking, removed from Continental theory in which we may find precedents for our own ?native? schools of thought.
Taylor and Hughes call for a congruity of the individual and the social. To be sure western society today shows greater tolerance of differences and mass culture is more diverse in its expressions than it was fifty years ago.
To some extent the avant-garde
exemplar has been co-opted into popular culture in all sorts of ways,
not the least in the appropriation of experimental films by rock video
makers and, at least the postures, of some performance art into rock
music. Within this context we can maybe understand the apparent postmodernist
acceptance of mass culture. Though, for the American Fred Camper (1986)
who does not discern an underlying benevolence within society, the avant-garde
is a singular project of individuation by which humans may begin to
see themselves, in some way, as being different from the crowd:
To strike out against a society
which, at its most extreme,
conceived of each of its members
as cogs in a wheel.
This, in explanation, of Brakhage's subjectivist immersion in life and cinema.
Canada, being a larger, wealthier and less isolated nation than New Zealand, one with huge public subsidies for the arts and networks of artist-run and media art centres has virtually willed the creation of a media culture connected to and interrelating with international contemporaries. Despite the experimental filmmaking precedent established by Len Lye, experimental film has been greeted with much greater ambivalence in New Zealand. In fact it has hardly been greeted at all.
Up to about 1990 most of our filmmakers
were self-taught, coming from either fine arts or music backgrounds.
Today more and more filmmakers are emerging from film schools and cinema
studies programmes that tend to homogenize history and attitudes. From
this change we can expect an increasing engagement with forms of popular
entertainment and technology or striving for alternatives from within
corporate structures. This may lead to a more complicit cinema, one
with narrower, non-traversable, margins. Resisting such trends, independently
organized screening events, such as the Hamilton Underground Film Festival,
offer an alternative from officially sanctioned exhibitions, holding
out the hope for the continuance of a homespun media arts culture.
Within the New Zealand context,
of a conventional paranoia about technology, a more open attitude toward
technology could be admitted. In the book HIGH TECH, R. L. Rutsky (1999)
suggests that technology now includes autonomous machines which will
radically alter our conceptions and representations of nature. It is
no longer a question of human attempts at mastery over nature. There
are now three of us in this marriage. Rutsky points to Heidegger as
a possible key to understanding relationships between art and technology.
For Heidegger, techne exemplifies a
conception of technology that is
more closely related to artistic
production ... It 'brings forth'
the elements of the world, allows
them to come to representation, by
'unsecuring' them from fixed
meanings or values.
The creation of Virtual Realities may allow us to move through imagined landscapes, landscapes made real by technology. Maybe we can, in this way, realize a virtual Garden of Eden, or Second Paradise, here on earth. (Or close to it). But in stepping back from this constructed vision, back to non-virtual reality, would we then be entering Hell?
Charlotte Davies in Montreal created virtual environments in which one could 'embed' oneself in 'Earth's lifeworld.' In her work OSMOSE (c1999), the spectator is immersed in a virtual world constructed out of, "Various Earth analogues - grid, clearing, leaf, cloud, abyss, code, subterranean, forest, text." Alternately, Margaret Dolinsky and Grit Sehmisch created virtual environments in which the spectator may discover other states of consciousness. In his project GENESIS (1999) Eduardo Kac created a 'synthetic' artist's gene by translating a sentence from the Bible into Morse code then converted the code to DNA base parts which were then cloned into plasmids to transform into bacteria.
In terms of artistic representation
this could mean a move from notions of collage and montage through to
those of reproducibility and manipulation. Pre-existing landscape images
could be subject to technical reproduction and manipulation. A crude
example of this would be the original planned opening shot of my landscape
video LANDSCAPISM which is taken from a photograph of a John Kinder
painting that was printed then scanned to CD before being downloaded
to digital video to be read in the context of the images and sounds
that accompany it. Thus the 'meaning' of Kinder's image is changed by
the new context in which it is presented. Kinder's image becomes mine.
Another variation could be the artist's immersion in the land, rather than the imposition of their ideas upon it. Ones recording and representation device, say a video capable cell phone, maybe even a cluster or circle of such phones, could be buried in a landscape as a mini-subterranean Stonehenge, and left subject to natural forces to be given the test of time. As interventionist strategies they could transmit out the sounds and images of their deterioration to randomly programmed numbers, tying up phone lines, calling wrong numbers, cluttering answering machines, becoming numerically unobtainable and speaking in clicks, crunches, squeals and dial tones. This being the vocabulary that we have willed upon ourselves. GPS navigational systems existent in cell phone technology could also be used as a way of measuring and mapping population densities and dispersal in various landscapes, again subversively calling and texting numbers at random and asking, "R U there?" The ubiquity of video capable cell phones creates the possibility for a domesticated 'folk', small screen, moving image culture as the polar opposite of the wide screen television and motion picture projection. Works composed specifically for tiny cell phone screens. One imagines that such work would be intimate and personal, utilizing close-ups rather than wide shots. Alternatively, biotechnical landscapes could be created in art galleries and museums, maybe even in a cinema. Imagine paying to go to a cinema to encounter and relate to a landscape titled THE LAND MACHINE from which images and sounds are being transmitted as it breathes, heaves and evacuates itself.
In another, titled LANDSCAPE THESIS, we could carefully dismantle an entire landscape, or, in contemporary parlance, environment, as display of how we construct nature, breaking it down piece by piece, numbering, maybe even naming, these pieces before transporting them somewhere else to be painstakingly reassembled into something that is both the same yet somehow different from the original manifestation. This process could be filmed in its entirety then buried in a time capsule to be retrieved and displayed at some future time and place. There is a precedent for this in a work that can be apprehended in its entirety as an idea. In 1977 Walter De Maria created EARTH ROOM, filling the floor of a SoHo loft, 3600 square feet of Manhattan real estate, with 22 inches of earth (dirt).
Maybe an artist could come up with something called A LIVING MACHINE, a complex piece of technology involving tubes, chips, wires, plugs and ventilators through which humans may directly interact with the landscape, in which each becomes inter-twined with and inseparable from the other. Or we could biogenetically fuse ourselves with the land. Then there would be no other. The living machine would be called GOD.
Maybe that God will be a hypercortext, a world mind, to which we are all linked. The notion of life and living may then be redefined from consciousness to connectedness. Those who can afford to be 'connected' to a technological network will be truly alive. Those who cannot afford to be connected will become a caste of 'untouchables', performing the physical labour necessary for the elite to maintain their connectedness. Such a future, then, would involve the redefinition of the terms of exclusion, domination and exploitation that characterize the present world.
Lev Manovich (2006) suggests that digital media lend themselves to hybridization in a logic of "remixability" the basic unit being, not the film frame, but,
A visual element placed in
the Composition window ... United
within the common software
environment, cinematography,
animation, computer animation,
special effects, graphic design,
and typography have come to form
a 'metamedium.' A work produced in
this new metamedium can use all
the techniques which were
previously unique to these
different media, or any subset of
these techniques ...
(along with any) new capabilities
specific to the computer.
In regards to landscape, the artist working in digital media could, for example, highlight the synthetic nature of their representation thereby stating that the viewer is experiencing a constructed landscape, one that may resist notions of seductive or sublime images.
For the German art historian Dieter Daniels (1997) hybridization is the natural arena for any artist working in new technologies:
From photography to virtual reality,
all the so-called new media hold a
cultural position in between or
outside existing artistic genres.
Anyone who wants to work in them has
to begin by reassessing and
recombining elements of existing
genres ... When artists work with
new media techniques, what is
happening is not the creation of
new genres but a fundamental
reappraisal of all existing genres.
Hybridization implies a possible confusion and instability arising from the ethereal nature of a cyberscape dependent upon specific technologies that are soon likely to be eclipsed by newer technologies. (The digital may soon be superseded by the genetic analogue computer). And then there is question of hybridization of what and for what? Art needs to be in the service of something, it needs a background horizon of greater depth than the new. Malcolm Le Grice (2001) suggests that one uses technology not for its own sake but rather to find the possibilities that technology offers to create new meanings out of old, enduring ideas. The notion of hybridization likewise, in its privileging of homogeneity over diversity, seems to work against the specific intercultural ethos that has been such a defining aspect of the New Zealand experience.
We do not always have to go forward, we can also mine the past, renewing it in ways compatible with shifting perceptions and philosophies. Patrick Freil, the programmer at Chicago Filmmakers (ILLUSIONS #27, 1998), told me that younger film artists are recycling past genres of avant-garde cinema without slavishly reproducing earlier types of work.
In terms of a genre for digitally synthesized cinema, open to both past and future, one may already have begun emerging in the American avant-garde cinema. P Adams Sitney (2002) describes it as the 'Mennipean satire',
A dialogue of forms and voices,
open to narrative elaborations
but not requiring them, in which
the characters embody rather than
manifest complex psychologies ...
All the ideas proposed within the
Menippean satire are subject to
irony; the very concept of a
philosophical resolution becomes
an occasion for parody. Fantasy
and realism alternate or even
coincide, more often than not
with a concatenation of styles and
perspectives. The Menippea frequently
incorporates other genres and films
within films.
What Sitney seems to be suggesting is something that we may recognize as postmodernism, possessing heterogeneity of styles, a pluralistic and ironic incorporation of earlier forms of avant-garde cinema whilst eschewing the formalism and heroics of that earlier movement. Such an approach would seem to be motivated by a relativism, different from that of the Cubists, in which there are no longer any Absolutes or certainties, just 'things' to be recontextualized and re-presented in new relationships
In looking to the land we may set aside the hermeticism of post-modernism by giving ourselves to nature, say as Chris Welsby does in his attempts to create an interface between 'mind' and 'nature.'
In my work, the mechanics of
film and video interact with
the landscape in such a way
that elemental processes -
such as changes in light,
the rise and fall of tides or
changes in wind directions -
are given the space and time
to participate in the process
of representation.
(Curtis & Wyver, 2005).
In handing responsibility over to technology, as Michael Snow did in LA REGION CENTRALE, (ILLUSIONS 28, 1999), we can even leave the human behind to cinematically realize post Renaissance ideas that humans are no longer the centre of the universe. We are merely dispersed fragments that can exist in some form of equilibrium with nature. Rather than destroying nature, and ourselves, through our efforts at domination and control. Domination and manipulation being exemplars of a ruling mentality that expresses itself popularly in the world of authoritarian falsehoods and fictions; the hierarchies of corporate, industrialized cinemas, complicit art markets and academies. The avant-garde has almost always stood in opposition to such hierarchies, their institutions and academies. They, by the being of their being, create the necessity of something that was once avant-garde, a something that distrusts orthodoxy and mediocrity in art and society. To revalue life in a world of death. Is it too much to ask that our media academics to also join us in the world of the living?
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself.
(I am large. I contain multitudes).
- Walt Whitman, LEAVES OF GRASS
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© Martin Rumsby 2009