… the event unpredictable
Friday, October 31, 2008
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Gambia Castle presents:
smashed to pieces
(in the still of the night)
gestures towards habitual actions while leaving the location vague and the event unpredictable
Amit Charan
Francis Alÿs
Michael Stevenson
Curated by Laura Preston
7 - 29 November 2008
Opening: Thursday 6 November 6 – 8pm
Screening and talk at 6pm / musical entertainment afterwards
Lawrence Weiner has recently commented that for him the concept of being an artist is to be ‘perplexed in public’. Taking images from the world, photographic and still, cinematic and moving collude to take the form of a belief that reality can be indexically traced and knowable. These traces become more insightful and in turn more perplexing when an understanding of the image as a concept in time is conveyed, particularly when the serial nature of the event is emphasised and its sequential experience confused. Looking back to the man who stopped time in pictures, the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge act as instants systematically subtracting duration from the event. These early studies of the medium’s potential were based on photographing the same activity from various angles simultaneously. By setting up an alternative reading of the event as a visually discontinuous sequence he presented a fragmented perception of the world, in what musician Karlheinz Stockhausen would later consider a ‘directionless time-field’. Muybridge’s technique in this sense can be read as symptomatic of an early modernity. Stockhausen was also interested in utilising the exponential perplexity of modernity by breaking up and dissecting duration to show it as a malleable material, in this case how sound can undergo a series of transformations independent of its starting point. An extension of this, and what Stockhausen and Muybridge’s work suggests, is that the indexical nature of the image enables reflection on the contradictions of modernity’s workings. In technology’s ability to capture reality, or rather our unreflexive want to innocently believe in its trace of truth, it both realises and captures the failure to perceive the irreducibility of the moment. This paradox signals the collapse of modernity’s ideal for progression towards certainty.
It is also here that the image can be seen as a placeholder creating a space to recognise that all is fiction. It is only in building up arbitrary signs, using short-cut codes, putting frames in motion that objectivity or rather a resemblance of it is formed. For Ludwig Wittgenstein the photographic image was a departure point for many of his philosophical ideas, and at the same time practical proof that for an object to be based in the world and linked to it as perceptual fact then it is reliant on serial or frequently repeated images. To connect Wittgenstein and Weiner then is to consider that the indexical quality of the image produced by the camera is similar to the malleable, sculptural workings of language, in that these signifying systems can only make comparisons to, extrapolate on, fragment what is experienced and what might possibly be seen. There is much to be puzzled by in images that narrate the concept of time. These images operate reflexively like interruptions in the scale and form of an event, de-familiarising what is understood or anticipated about a moment in time. The artists in the exhibition consider the fiction that arises, pausing to lend images the multi-sided, multi-directional dimensions of the event. This series of small yet expansive works draws on the historical ideas and temporal perplexities that can come from a state of process, rehearsal and reoccurrence. In narrating history as a multi-directional sequence of images emphasis is placed on dis-covering the simultaneous workings of time, and implicating the role of the artist as the perplexing narrator. The stories within each work connect through their traces of undermining modernity’s valuing of economic progression and political probabilities, which in turn reveals the disparate yet extensive links between art, political history and social happening. Reflecting upon their status as images, placeholders generating an act of retelling, the works in the exhibition leave the event unresolved, in a fictional state of constant rehearsal. Like the striptease its come-on is never consummated. Though if it were, what indexical image would be captured if we have the power to continually see things differently?
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