Believable Fictions, Art Monthly

Walsh, Maria, Believable Fictions, Art Monthly no342 p11-14, 2010/ Ja 2011

NOTES!

In an interview in 1999, Issac Julien responded to the question of why so many artists are using cinema as subject matter by saying: 'It was as if so-called cinema has replaced huge paintings such as Julian Schnabel's. Artists like Stan Douglas, however, seem interested in making work that has cinematic interest beyond the textual surface of the image -- or its deconstruction. Yet in his show at Dia Center for the Arts he seemed concerned with something more old fashioned and Brechtian -- with changing the rules of representation for its own sake.'

Contrary to underscoring the illusion of film performance, what is more pertinent today is the creation of believable fictions in order to create what Hito Steyerl described in a recent article in Frieze as 'an audiovisual politics of intensity'.

I want to begin my exploration with a classic example of foregrounding the mechanics of performance from the 1990s, Pierre Huyghe's Remake, 1995, a video reproduction of Hitchcock's Rear Window, 1954. In this piece, the actors perform 'the acting found in the original film rather than the actor's role', leading the critic Jean-Christophe Royoux to state in his 1999 essay 'Remaking Cinema' that Remake is an updated version of Brecht's alienation effect where the performance of an actor is put in parenthesis by the karaoke effect of quoting Hitchcock's film by memory. While such work is interesting and clever, and coincided with 1990s death knells being sounded about cinema, the deconstructive approach to cinema in moving-image work by artists often misses the extent to which classical film worlds -- for example Hitchcock's -- are already littered with what we might now call reflexive moments but without foreclosing on the pleasures of imaginary identification. Jimmy Stewarf s view from his apartment of the apartments in the building opposite is already a staging within the film of the position of the cinematic voyeur and, in Vertigo, Hitchcock plays with intra and extra diegetic worlds by giving the spectator knowledge about the film world that is unknown to the film protagonist, again played by Stewart, who remains unaware he is being duped by Kim Novak for a large part of the film. These reflexive moments are integrated with the continuum of the film world and its performances in ways which allow us to access a range of emotional flows and rhythms rather than simply presenting ideological stereotypes of the machinations of desire.


the peripatetic nature of gallery space can be so unaccommodating to audience reception and attention, many artists have absconded to the cinema. Recent successes such as Steve McQueen and Sam Taylor-Wood have largely accepted the conditions of what we recognise as narrative cinema, but more relevant to my exploration here of how the strategies used by artists to deconstruct the illusion of film performance can instead engage affective truths of human experience

Film performance is a very powerful mechanism for enabling us to inhabit bodies and spaces that we would not normally enter into. Artists' moving-image work generally tries to deconstruct identification with on-screen personages, situating them in self-reflexive scenarios that suspend the fascination a character's performance might hold for us. But fascination does not mean we don't realise it is a performance. Projected performances enable us to explore imaginative understandings of what it might be to be human. While 'Brechtian' strategies might inspire formal innovation, the projected photographs of the moving image emit performances whose energies and rhythms resonate with the core selves of captivated audiences.