Components of the Image by Heidi Kawai Smith

Components of the Image

10 - 18 October 2009 +44 141 Gallery 100 Eastvale Place Glasgow G3 8QG

Eugenia Ivanissevich Jon Garlick Michael Schwab Nick Smith Oliver Murray

Contents Acknowledgments

Components of the Image, An Exhibition

8-18

Nick Smith

Artists

19-51

Eugenia Ivannisisvich

21-25

Jon Garlick

27-33

Michael Schwab

34-39

Nick Smith

40-45

Oliver Murray

47-51

Installation

52-69

Dissecting the Image

71-74

Biographies

76-80

Acknowledgments Openvizor Scottish Arts Council Glasgow City Council SWG3 (Jamie, Mutley) +44 141 Gallery Metro Imaging

Components of the Image; An Exhibition by Nick Smith

Components of the Image brings together a selection of artists who question our understanding of how images exist now. The exhibition is the first in a series of events curating work by contemporary practitioners using seminal texts that have made us re-think what an image is and means. Using the last chapter in Gilles Deleuzes text Cinema 2 as a starting point COI brings together five artists with varied practices who deal with this theme in a multitude of ways, which all nod to various components Deleuze references in relationship to Cinema. From the subtlest of sculptures to the most palpable photography the work on display at +44 141 Gallery in Glasgow you could say is conservative in that it stays within the boundaries of the rectangle and the video screen, however there is subversive radical gestures that lay â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;withinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; the work, within the reading of these pictures, projections, videos and sculptures.

Now, it is the visual image in its entirety that must be read, the components used to ‘read’ an image being now only the ‘pointillé’ (small dots used to create a larger pattern) of a stratigraphic layer or the variable connections from one layer to another, the passages from one to the other. – the readability of the visual image, the ‘duty’ of reading the image , no longer relates to a specific element. Gilles Deleuze – Cinema 2

Gilles Deleuze

Part of the reason for the impact of Deleuze’s writings on cinema is simply that he is the first important philosopher to have devoted such detailed attention to it. Of course, many philosophers have written about movies, but Deleuze offers an analysis of the cinema itself as an artistic form, and develops a number of connections between it and other philosophical work. The first book is entitled Cinema 1: The Movement Image deals with cinema and its development through to the Second World War. Deleuze’s analysis begins by coming to new understandings of the concepts of the image and movement. The image, above all, is not a representation of something, that is, a linguistic sign. This definition relies upon the age-old Platonic distinction between form and matter, in its modern Saussurean form of signifier-signified. Rather, Deleuze wants to collapse these two orders into one, and the image thus becomes expressive and affective: not an image of a body, but the body as image. The movement from the first text to Cinema 2: The TimeImage has a significance closely related to Kant’s socalled Copernican revolution in philosophy. Up until Kant, time was subject to the events that took place within it, time was a time of seasons and habitual repetition it was not able to be considered on its own, but as a measure of movement. One element of Kant’s achievement for Deleuze, is his reversal of the time-movement relationship: he establishes time itself as an element to which

movement must be subordinated, a pure time. In the cinema, Deleuze argues, a similar reversal takes place. The historico-cultural reason behind this reversal is the event of World War two itself. With the great truths of Western culture put so deeply in question by the before unimaginable methods employed and their forthcoming results, the sensory-motor apparatus of the movement-image are made to tremble before the unbearable, the too-much of life’s possibilities, the potential of the present. No longer could the dogmatic truths that had guided society, and cinema to an extent, allow the apparently ‘natural’ movement from one thing to the next in an habitual fashion: ‘natural’ links precisely lost their efficiency. And with the use of unnatural or false links, which do not follow the sequence or narrative affect of the movement-image, time itself, the time-image, is manifested in cinema (Deleuze considers Orson Welles to be the first auteur to make use of the time-image). Rather than finding time as an, “indirect representation,”, the viewer experiences the movement of time itself, which images, scenes, plots and characters presuppose or manifest in order to gain any sort of movement whatsoever. Along with this ‘external’ reason, there is also for Deleuze a motivation within cinema itself to go from the movement-image to the time-image. The movement image has the tendency, thanks to the habitual experience of movement as normal and centered, to justify itself in lation to truth: as Deleuze argues with regard to the do13

Andy Warhol; ‘Kiss’ 1964. 16mm B&W film. 54 min

gmatic image of thought, there is the presupposition that thought naturally moves towards truth. Of course, Deleuze suggests, cinema, when truly creative, never relied upon this presupposition, and yet, “the movementimage, in its very essence, is answerable to the effect of truth which it invokes while movement preserves its centres”. In questioning its own presuppositions, Deleuze argues, cinema moved towards a new, different, way of understanding movement itself, as subordinate to time. One of the central consequences for cinema that this move from movement-image to time-image makes again highlights one of Deleuze’s central concerns, to establish an ontology and a semiology of force: “What remains? There remain bodies, which are forces, nothing but forces.” Since the cinema of the time-image is concerned to liberate images from carrying or implying time in order to form narrative (no less than liberating time itself from narrative), images are themselves free now to express forces, “shocks of force,” . Scenes, movements and language become expressive rather than representative. A piece of cinema that has been referenced alot within this context of stepping away from the functional mechanics of representive cinema towards moving image in a gallery context is Andy Warhol’s ‘Kiss’. A 54 min long montage of couples passionatly kissising. The dynamism of its’ affective forces unleashed by pure optical and sound situations (forces that are precisely not translated into action, hence their afective intensity). 15

Sonsigns open up ‘non-localisable’, virtual dimensions (memories, for example) that intensify the time-images presented on the screen. Opsigns and sonsigns are thus no longer tethered to action and movement. Rather, they are ‘vector points in space’ that can alter the configuration of the cinematic whole that we experience temporally as well as affectively and corporeally. This multivectorial experience of cinematic space and time adds an interesting philosophical dimension to the intriguing experience of watching passionate couples in Warhol’s Kiss. What might Warhol’s kiss tell us about the brain? This is one way of transiting to Gregg Lambert and Gregory Flaxman’s admirable “Ten Propositions on the Brain”. In a text that performs a veritable becoming-Deleuze, Lambert and Flaxman outline ten conceptual variations on the theme of cinema and the brain (‘the brain is the screen’). In manifesto-like style, Lambert and Flaxman declare that it is ‘high time’ that we turn from the tired history of consciousness to the ‘incomparably more complex question of the brain’ (Ambrose and Khandker. Not the brain of cognitive neuroscience or materalist theories of consciousness, of course, but Deleuze’s enimatic Bergsonian thesis that ‘thinking itself is situated within a “machine assemblage of moving images” from which the brain is materially indistinguishable’. To my mind, this is one of the most difficult and puzzling aspects of Cinema II: what to make of Deleuze’s appropriation of the Bergsonian metaphysics of images.

For the Bergson of Matter and Memory, there are only images that act upon and react to each other, the entire set of which comprises an ‘infinite whole’ or plane of immanence; the human brain is taken as ‘one among many images’ on this plane that is nonetheless capable of comprehending a section of the whole

From the chaos of the universe at its birth, a primordial plane (or ‘metacinema’) in which ‘there is no distinction between image, matter, movement, and perception,’ individuated bodies (‘molar ties’) somehow emerge; among these, there are some that will introduce an interval between action and reaction, thus commencing the extraordinary evolution of the brain. According to Deleuze-Bergson, the brain can be understood, like Leibniz’s monad, as ‘a kind of hiatus in the field of images, a synaptic caesura that perceives (“prehends”) the world from a particular point of view’. But the brain takes its own affective interval as a means of stabilising its perception and privileged point of view on the universe (of images); it construes the world ‘cinematically’ by schematising reality according to the sensory motorschema of perception-images, affection-images, and action images. The habitualised brain, however, is captured by the narcissistic delusion of its own centrality, imagining itself as the organising centre of the world, now construed as a theatre of action that stands at its disposal. As Deleuze puts it, with the rise of the modern subject, ‘the world has become a bad film’.

Artists

Eugenia Ivanissevich

Eugenia Ivanissevich explores what happens as the three dimensional world is captured onto the flat surface of a print or screen; and how through processes of deconstruction, re-assemblage, spatial configurations and layering, she may undo that. This has led her to a practice where film and photography become building blocks towards a sculptural aesthetic in constant flux. Inventive and playful new forms of representation arise through such exercises, which in turn demand new ways of looking at and engaging with from the viewerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s point of view. Her installation and objectbased works adopt method of working from collage, Photoshop and pop-up books and is often site-specific.

Under Maintenance 2007. Ink-jet prints mounted on MDF, binoculars. 2x3m

Dont we always wish... 2008. A4 ink-jet prints, stills from Raging Bull. 1.5x1.5m

Stationary Ballet 2008. 9 slide objects, lightbox. 150x25x35cm

Jon Garlick

Through deconstructionist philosophies Jon Garlick re presents and re-contextualises film narrative structures. His practice utilises various techniques of reappropriating existing footage such as re-editing narrative films or creating collages from multiple film clips from his accumulated archives. He investigates the audiovisual image, it’s unique (non) narrative language and where, in between these two entities, lays the real and the fantastical.

Untitled (Bang). 2005. Video with text ‘bang’ which decreses in size as artists voice gets louder, exclaiming the word ‘bang’.

Henry V (Metamorphosis), 2007. Installation Shot, Leeds College of Art and Design.

Henry V (Metamorphosis) consists of a number of selected scenes within the original film spliced together in frames moving acorss the screen from left to right. As the scene moves outside the frame the audio remains present, with each frame leaving behind another layer of sound. Non of the frames contain dialogue, just movement / background sounds.

Grand Canyon and Wildwasser, 2005. Ripped out Murels. 267x192 cm

Michael Schwab

Schwabsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; work investigates a different way of seeing that moves away from the central perspective of the camera and uses manifestations of technology to bring about a more abstract, dynamic, and even contradictory, visual space. Using a number of methods such as selecting blobs of colour in images, mapping urban spaces and distorting shapes and figures, which are then reworked within a variety of media. The work critically challenges preconceptions of technology by advancing an artistic understanding that allows us to see the world from the hypothetical perspective of radical technology.

GPS Circle, 2007. White Gaffer Tape, 300x350 cm Inst.Huisrechts, Amsterdam

London Eye, 2004. Household Paint and found photograph. 200x50 cm

Henry Moore: Knife Edge, 2008. C-type print on aluminium, 147x112cm

Nick Smith

Smith works predominanty in photography and also in film and video documenting sites or objects of significance either to history or of personal interest. Using this process to transform â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;given interpretationsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; and make us re-think the relationahip between looking and interpreting. His imagery contains seeds of understanding that exist at the very threshold of thought, displaced and in a state of oscillation between life and death, memory and erasure.

Oliver Murray

Within Murray’s practice he explores the ways in which the cinematic medium has blurred distinctions between illusion and reality, and thereby investigate the notion of a “cinema of illusion” and escapist leisure pastimes in the twenty first century. His interests lye in cinema’s power to seduce the viewer into its imaginary spaces. How it allows us to abandon our sensibilities and become lost in a three dimensional dreamspace.

Flight over bin bags at 25fps. 2008. Live feed video installation using motorized revolving drum and bin bags.

Installation

Last two pages from left to right; Michael Schwab, Floor Installation, 2009. Gaffa Tape, dimensions variable. Photo-murels, 2007. Ripped out photo-murals, 100x130 cm

Above; Michael Schwab, Photo-Murels, 2007. Installation

Left; Nick Smith. Lynne Chadwick: The Watchers, 2008. C-type on Aluminium. 120x90 cm. Tracy Emin: Roman Standard (diptych).

Above; Eugenia Ivanissevich. Movement Studies, 2009. Looped Video with drawings selotaped to monitor. Right; Movment Studies, detail. Installation shot

Eugenia Ivanissevich. Stationary Ballet, 2008. 9 slide objects, lightbox. 150x25x35cm

Left; Jon Garlick. Othello Abridged, 2007. DVD projection Above and right; Oliver Murray. Flight Over Binbags at 25 FPS, 2008. Dimensions variable.

Dissecting the Image by Stefanie Tann (PHD Glasgow School of Art)

Chris Wainwright speaks of photography as akin to the craft painting and claims to only produce 12 major works a year. “Components of the image” is an interesting place to start thinking of the nature of the image in the hands of the digerati. Digital diarrhoea, hyper snap shot shooters, what indeed is this commodity – “the image” we have come to cherish, reproduce and hoard? The exhibition sponsored by the National Lottery and curated by Nick Smith, attempts to take apart the mechanisms of image reproduction in witty and thought provoking motifs. Eugenia Ivanissevich’s work “Stationary Ballet” and “Motion studies” are poetic and witty comments on the nature of filmic image. We often take for granted that by the frame is the building block of movement and only in community or assembled, have the potential to create for us film narratives. Her selection, each image, an arc, a flow, a direction offers the viewer something to anticipate, something to behold. From simple everyday objects frozen in various states of motion captured in slides that are presented together in layers generate scenes of grace and drama to everyday objects. Everyday inanimates are disturbed and the moments of disruption is looped again and again, playful marks in marker; with translucent paper anticipate, underline and highlight for the viewer, where these objects pivot, fall or dance. Movement, mapping the eye, understanding how we look and where we look in choosing these playful points of drama allow us to soak in moments of anticipation and reflection. The repetition of the image in this sense creates a space for imagination to become physical, like the dangling blocks of slides hanging by a thread, suspended animation at how sophisticated our vision is bemuses and enchants the viewer simply and elegantly.

Michael Schwab’s “Photo Murals” are powerful and political motifs of the image as power, as raconteur, as carrier of content and meaning. A3 size glossy photos of pastoral scenes in Swiss postcard kitsch are presented with large parts of the image ripped out and torn edges glaring unceremoniously back at the viewer. A comment perhaps on the throwaway culture of the image that is reproduced to death in the digital age, that even in its demise we imagine and fill in the white space what the image may be, relying on memory, traces of context and for a split second there the mind meets the gap. The exercise of having 4 or 5 of these images in a row suggest to us the repetition becomes after a time, pointless and futile and that a deep yearning and longing for the real is the only true fact. The spine of nostalgia is ripped unceremoniously out and there we are left - foolish for having counted on such constructions for identity. Jon Garlick and Ollie Murray’s works made me think a lot about sites of viewing the image, be it the cinema, the television, the laptop, an ipod, a mobile phone or a frame, the projection or redistribution of images via a network of cables makes me think of the distance data travels to deliver a message. Jon Garlick’s choice of a stunted elongated wall no higher than one’s knee, to present a re-cut version of Othello made one think about scale, and the desire that is magnified when we watch a cinema screen play out our fantasies, here this reduced Shakespeare with it’s impudent cuts and cheeky gashing of time removes emotive cartharsis in the viewer leaving the image to speak for itself as if each frame shuffled out of joint can no longer carry meaning and instead becomes comic and macabre. Why Othello? Perhaps as the film ( or should we say data stream) interrupted with gaps flicker in our mind’s eye these absences dancing “Even now, now, very now, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe.” empty voids on blank canvases of meaning fucking with our expectations of vision. 73

Ollie Murray’s crudely pieced together film reel made out of wood, an awkward organic material rarely seen in the cinema arsenal except perhaps as trimming to the stately stage, seems to be a crude rendition of nature mimicking the steel reel that plays out the fantasies of the masses. In place of smooth uninterrupted celluloid he puts sporadically positioned bin bags and invites the viewer to turn the wheel, but few dare or look for the motors and mechanisms that will make the movement happen for them. There are 3 sites of events in the piece, the invitation to turn the wheel, the camera set up to record and “watch” the moment where the spectator becomes an actor, and our human eye can follow the cable from the mechanical eye which generates the third site of performance, the broadcast, the mirror, the contained view, cropped reality of the results of the action within, an actorless stage, mute. Nick Smith’s “The Watchers” reflects this strange resistance, a portrait of a buried bench in an anonymous green space, will we see with new eyes or remain buried undead and undeveloped. Like “Tracy Emin’s Roman standard”, the diptych reflects the same scene in two different instances, reminding us that an image is a record of a moment that is ever changing, yet can we fall short of greatness or do not meet a standard, how frail our existence if all can be lost in a blink or if we count on such measures. The choice of “the image” over “an image” is also a stark reminder that in the terabytes of data, the singular, the crafted painting is all we need to remember, the mechanics of seeing was well illustrated by these clever examples and in this shelter for stuffed eyes we must seek out “the image” renewed and recharged to make meaningful ones. Thank you for showing a fun, playful and thought provoking exhibition, looking forward to more work.

Artists Biographies Eugenia Ivanissevich Born: Colchester, 1980 Lives: London Education 2006 BA Fine Art, Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London, UK Exhibitions 2009 Aug ¨El Historico Imaginario de Casa Mojana¨, Centro Cultural España, Montevideo, Uruguay March FORMAT FESTIVAL Comission Award, QUAD, Derby, UK July ¨PLaying with Narratives¨, James Taylor Gallery, London, UK July “Massive”, Supine Studios, London, UK March“Fictions”, Bonnington Gallery Nottingham, UK 2008 Sept “Jatkaprojects Session III ”, the Jatka, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic July “Zero de Conduite II”, ELEVATOR Gallery, London, UK March “EPIC”, AutoItalia South East, London. UK Feb “Persisting Uncertainties”, The Showroom, Berlin, Germany 2007 July “Metamorphose”, Sardine Factory, Skoanevic, Norway June “Demolition!”, Site Gallery, Liverpool, UK “Under Maintenance”, Victoria Baths, Manchester, UK Nov “Sixty Second Film and Video Festival”, Portsmouth Screen 06, Arts Centre, Portsmouth, UK “Plink Plonk Whirly Whirly zzzzzzzzzzzz Phttt”, Portsmouth Screen 06, New Royal Theatre, Portsmouth, UK Oct “Rodrigo Cañas, Florencia Vivas y Eugenia Ivanissevich”, Museo Arte Contemporaneo, Salta, Argentina

Jon Garlick Born: Leeds, 1986 Lives: Japan Education 2007 BA Fine Art, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, UK Exhibitions 2009 A Cinema at the James Taylor Gallery. The James Taylor Gallery, London Passing Through, The James Taylor Gallery, London The Imagined Archive. http://add-art.org Flash Company: A Handkerchief Show. Cecil Sharp House, London 2008 For My Part. The James Taylor Gallery, London Auto-Italia, London 2007 EX Artist Talk. Leeds College of Art and Design EX. Leeds College of Art and Design Direction 2007. Lethaby Gallery, London

Michael Schwab Born: Hockenheim, Germany, 1966 Lives: London Education 2002-2008 Practice-based PhD, School of Fine Art, Royal College of Art, London 1999-2000 Master of Art in Photography, School of Media, London College of Printing 1989-1996 Magister Artium (MA) in Philosophy, University of Hamburg, Germany Exhibitions 2009 Group Show ‘Exhibit 1’, The Old Police Station, London Performance at: ‘Friends of the Divided Mind’, Royal College of Art, London 2008 Group Show: ‘The Art of Research: Research Narratives’, Chelsea College of Art and Design, London ‘Figurations of Knowledge: Art as Research’, Villa Elisabeth, Berlin ‘Full Circle’, Studio 1.1, London ‘Distance Circles’, Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn ‘figure’, The Tramdepot Gallery, London 2007 ‘Full Circle’, Huisrechts, Amsterdam Group show: ‘Objet d’Art’, Alexia Goethe Gallery, London Group show: ‘Productive Matter: Materialising Research’, Cafe Gallery Projects, London Group show ‘Photography’, Royal College of Art, London 2006 Group show, ‘Notions of Drawing’, Artbust, CIP House Exhibition Space, London Group show, ‘Too Dark in the Park’, Cafe Gallery Projects, London Group show ‘Photography’, Royal College of Art, London

Nick Smith Born: Liverpool 1982 Lives: London Education 2007 - 2008 - PGC Photography, Central Saint Martins, London 2004 - 2007 - BA (Hons) Fine Art, Central Saint Martins, London

Exhibitions 2009 Components of the image : SWG3, +44 141 Gallery, Glasgow Scotland Bloomberg New Contemporaries: Roundhouse, Manchester Bloomberg New Contmporaries: Rochelle School, London Super Monday Group Show: The Crypt, London 2008 Salon 08: Vine Space, Vyner Street, London England Islington Salon: Islington, London, England Parareal: Dalston, London, England Central Saint Martins PG Cert. Show: Central Saint Martins School of Art, London, England Interim Show: Old Truman Brewery, London, England Epic: Auto Italia South East, London, England 2007 The Sprezzatura Maze: +44 141 Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland 2006 Diverted Restrictions: Electrowerx, London, England Human Being Human: Noliaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Gallery, London, England 2005 Trinity Bouy Wharf: East India Docks, London, England

Oliver Murray Born: 1986 Education Glasgow School of Art (Glasgow, UK) 2004-2008 Pratt Institiute (New York City, USA) 2007 Exhibitions 2009 “Lost On Blizzard Mountain” “Best in Show” John Jones Project space. 2008 “The Art of the Unexpected” “Glasgow School of Art Degree Show 2008”