Monday 26 November 2012

2 years in the making


'The Source' is a video installation that is currently at Tate Liverpool  and features filmed conversations with creative individuals – including BeckJack White and Tilda Swinton – as they share their thoughts on the roots and realization of the creative process. In summary it is an investigation into creativity; the versatility of the creative process from one individual to another and how these different approaches relate and overlap. He says in this vein "One thing I found really interesting about this project is how many avenues it exposed."



This  video is an extract from a conversation between Doug Aitken and the artist Ryan Trecartin. For me there are some seminal suggestions being made about the approach of creating art works. The liberation of different influences is discussed, along with a notion of transcending cultural and media boundaries. The two also discuss the role of the viewer in Ryan's work and how the narrative is created in a dialect between the work and the viewer. The segment of the interview I am discussing I have transcribed below.

R.T. "The editorial process for the viewer kind of happens inside themselves, cause without the viewer the arc isn't really there, cause there are so many potential arcs happening that you have to curate that narrative yourself."
D.A. "Your kind of empowered to make these links. . ."

R.T. "Yeah were able to see sort of the symbolic meaning and a vibe, rather then just an image."

D.A. "And would you say that more about navigating in an intuitive way, rather then a literal way?"
R.T. "Yeah, like our intuitive intelligence is being developed, and were also more proud of it now I think, and were also recognising that its valid and important. Like our curatorial  our editorial, our hobbyest voices are all growing."

D.A. "I think in many ways, if anything its a form of empowerment . . ."

R.T. "Yeah."
D.A. ". . .and i really like that, because I don't want to be fed anything that's on the top of a pyramid."
R.T. "Yeah. TV, Movies, games, the Art world, Writing and journalism, its all gonna merge into creative programming. The intersection of all those things, it wont have a hierarchy, I don't think."
D.A. "Yeah, and simply just who you are, every viewer has their own energy source; and as they move through time, whats around them merges and transforms constantly."
R.T. "Yeah. I want there to be no such thing as reality or fantasy. It just is, you know. What it is, when it is." 


Elizabeth Price

     Recently whilst in London i took some time to see the turner prize shortlist at Tate Britain. There among the other three artists was Elizabeth Price's video 'Choir'. The film is part of a series of three films shown at her exhibition at the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art. They had to say about her work:
Elizabeth Price creates immersive video installations incorporating digital moving image, text and music. They draw upon existing archives of film, photography and physical collections of art to invent new, apocalyptic narratives.
Each video opens by establishing a particular setting: an auditorium, a sculpture gallery or, in her newest work, a wrecked container ship at the bottom of the sea. She draws upon historical film, photographic archives and collections of artifacts to generate fantasy episodes. 

The word 'fantasy' is used here and in the same context that Trecartin pursues a subversion of reality and fantasy, here Price crafts a narrative from various existing sources where differing from Trecartins approach, there is a more prescribed narrative that appears. Particularly in choir, separate situation and components are described quite literally and yet they are composed together in a way which is both imaginative and unexpected. Just as Price explains the link between hand gestures in an interview about Choir below:


Now to my work
     This week I had a meeting with a tutor of mine John Czernik. We hadn't met up this year and so i was trying to update him and we spoke about the work I had done and how my ideas and developed. After 15 minuets or so I He asked where my recent kaleidoscope video had come from and so i explained that I have edited a video i'd made on foundation 2 years ago. After agreeing that we felt the new kaleidoscope work was too 'pretty' in its abstraction, I showed him the original video. Watch below:

We sat and laughed, the video ended, and John tunred to me and asked me how long it had taken to develop the process for this result. I remembered back and realised that it had taken me a good 4 to 5 months of work to source all the programs and come to grips with it. He looked at me and asked why I would put all that work in and not use this technique more; At that moment I realised two things, one that the best piece of work I'd made was over two years ago, and two, that i wanted to make more of it. This thought has been renforced through exposure to the artists above.
Developing down this avenue, surprisingly talks very clearly to my interest in the palimpsest, and the overlapping of both culture and imagery in my recent works this academic year. Here are two works by Luke Fowler, the piece is a photo collage using both juxtaposition of imagery and composition to create a visual narrative:
 All Day Monday And Tuesday (Lost Lake), Luke Fowler,  2010
 All Day Monday And Tuesday (Library of Congress), Luke Fowler,  2010 

These two images serve as a metaphor for the sort of consideration I want to making in relation to the development of the video work. The playing off of imagery against each other and the narratives that can be created within that. Interestingly I saw this work at the Turner Prize alongside Elizabeth Price's; at the time it inspired me with the possibility of collage and montage, i suppose it was telling when put into context with my tutor later that week. Price uses text and audio in her collage. Audio I have tried, Text I have not, and this will be among my thoughts going forward.

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