Kim Machan — Introduction

Introduction

LANDSEASKY: revisiting spatiality in video art travelled to eleven venues in three countries. Often referred to as a touring exhibition, it is better thought of as an exhibition plotted across multiple locations confgured and reconfgured in the prevailing space. The plasticity of the exhibition through site and context is a leading characteristic of the project, as are notions of landscape and its elements, video1 and its sculptural attributes, contemporary art and its spatial approaches. These concerns were omnipresent as the exhibition developed over an extended period beginning in 2012 with OCAT Shanghai as our foundation exhibition partner followed by Griffth University Art Gallery, Brisbane and a subsequent curatorial residency at Seoul Art Space Geumcheon. As the project progressed a new spatial array in Seoul was brokered with the generous support of Sunjung Kim, to consolidate a cluster of six venues in the Samcheongdong cultural district. Two other institutions joined adding to the diversity of exhibition spaces and audience dimensions – the National Art School Gallery in Sydney and fnally, the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou.

A collection of essays by participants and collaborators are offered here to refect upon the exhibition. The artistic directors of the non-commercial host venues Mariagrazia Constantino, Artistic Director of OCAT Shanghai; Sunjung Kim, Chief Curator of Art Sonje Center; Naomi Evans, Acting Director of Griffth University Art Gallery (2012 – 2015); and Judith Blackall, National Art School Curator and Gallery Manager contribute commentary from their city venue and to varying degrees, the supporting context. Andrew McNamara offers a very specifc historical examination of early spatial experiments in modernist art in Europe through his research evidencing Erich Buchholz’s spatial experiments in 1922 that are prescient to Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau project. Paul Bai extrapolates spatial theory recounting Henri Lefebvre’s and Edward Soja’s perspectives before offering a progressive proposition to apply to contemporary art’s critical reading. Ingrid Periz writes as an observer, responding to the exhibition with her refections and insights, and acknowledging Alain Corbin’s historiography notes where ‘the Western seaside is a postEnlightenment, and specifcally Romantic project, underwritten by the new science of geology and the history of Dutch landscape painting’.

The curatorial project that is LANDSEASKY: revisiting spatiality in video art, was born of a desire to revisit, clarify and extend video as a fne art tool, a medium to be understood and expressed fundamentally as a sculptural experience rather than a cinematic narrative. By approaching video as an ‘object in space’ the aim was to offer a moment to pause, to recalibrate and attune the medium before us. By reintroducing one of the earliest Conceptual Art moving image works by Jan Dibbets, the tone of the exhibition offered a focused aesthetic counterpoint, addressing artistic problems that are international, able to be approached cross-culturally, and one that made the actual experience of the works in-situ of paramount importance.

Imagining an exhibition in Shanghai, Seoul, Guangzhou, Sydney and Brisbane naturally created geographical parameters that informed the exhibition. Thinking about these disparate cities, what do we share and what lies between us? We stand on the land with the sky above, and the sea between us. The components of landscape – land, sea and sky, inform our fundamental understanding of spatial relationships and go back to the beginnings of visual representation expressed in all civilisations.

The limitation of the image – sky and land or sky and sea – restricts the visual elements to reveal the artists’ conceptual approaches with the intention of exposing a medium-specifc analysis of screen space as an image with both sculptural and conceptual attributes. The curatorial approach is to bring to the foreground evidence of artists working with an analysis of screen space that demonstrates a variety of sophisticated approaches. This project attends to reinstate video as a medium to focus and draw upon its history within fne arts, and challenge the illusionist elements that we readily consume in screen culture. Peter Weibel summarily describes the Media Art of the 1960’s and 1970’s as being ‘anti-illusion’ and Media Art of the 1990’s onward as having ‘illusion and allusion tendencies’.2 Weibel, also an artist himself using flm and video in the 70’s, goes on to describe the dangers of both anti-illusion and allusory art. To revisit and potentially transgress these dichotomies, LANDSEASKY turns away from popular screen media references to face the elemental and phenomenological.

While researching the notion of the horizon, the work in photography and flm by Dutch conceptual artist Jan Dibbets’ fgured prominently. His Perspective Corrections dating from 1968 transformed the way we

think about photography as an art medium. His calculating and conceptual approach to photography contributed to a particular aesthetic canon that is analytical, disciplined and reductive. In 1970 and 1971 Dibbets made a series of 16 and 32mm flms that employed the movement of the camera as an editing technique to record systematically smooth sweeping pans up and down, side to side and diagonal movements across land and seascapes. These works simultaneously force the illusion of space and the reality of space into one plane. While the moving image can be read as a depiction of a sea horizon by the recording of sea and sky, the rapid reorientation of the horizon line insists that this is an abstraction, a fat image that is projected through light and space.

Short excerpts of the Horizon – Sea series were available online at the Netherlands Media Art Institute (NMAI)3 website where I saw these works moving for the frst time. Through Jan Dibbets’ support and consultation with the Stedelijk Museum, all three works were made available for the exhibition and shown simultaneously for the frst time since they were originally created in 1971.4 This fact is a rich point to savour in the history of the moving image. Before the advent of data projectors assembling seven 16mm flm projectors in one space would have been a sizeable achievement in itself. It took just over forty-three years for Horizon – Sea series I, II and III to unite in an extended installation at the fve venues in an accumulated viewing period nearing 200 days.

Dibbets’ work sets an anchor point into the Conceptual Art movement and spatial experiments with the moving image of the early 70’s. From this launch point, the art works in LANDSEASKY turn to an investigation of video space, revealing a wide range of approaches. The art works are constructed more than edited in appearance. Each work, notwithstanding single channel projection works, is situated as an ‘image object’ within the gallery’s architecture grounding them within the site rather than onto it. In several instances this was achieved by forcing the projection image to meet the foor (João Vasco Paiva, Giovanni Ozzola, Derek Kreckler, Craig Walsh, Zhu Jia and in one venue Lauren Brincat) thereby constructing another curious horizon proposition – where the wall meets the foor.

Three works in particular break into the gallery space through varied screen projection strategies. Heimo Zobernig’s Untitled Nr 23, 2005, single channel projection slightly exceeds the assembled six portable screens allowing the edges to slip past to the wall directly behind. Through the use of chroma keying, the real and the projection of the projection screens are further confused, resulting in waves of liminal and reconciled spatial experiences. Addressing a similar artistic problem, Paul Bai’s Untitled (Wind Charm), 2013, employs two white fat timber sheets that lean against the wall to catch part of an intense bluesky projection in which a spinning wind charm meditatively performs. His projection of the sky is in fact a recording of the sky, projected through the sky, albeit sky that is surrounded by gallery walls. The projection of the sky breaks open the interpretation of the space before us to question where the work, or for that matter the sky, begins or ends. In another work Littoral, 2014, by Derek Kreckler, the never repeated visual experience is articulated through a custom-made sliced paper screen that is randomly disrupted by an oscillating electric fan. The image of waves rolling to shore, spilling through the screen, extends the projection through the uncertain space between the wall and the screen creating a tentative and unstable territory.

Another sea horizon features in João Vasco Paiva’s work Forced Empathy, 2011. In contrast to Dibbets’ analogue image manipulation, he uses computer programming to switch the orientation of the horizon. By upturning the laws of nature between the sea and the inanimate buoy, the image proposes an impossible view where the ocean buoy remains steady and the sea compensates to take on the natural movement of the object. The juxtaposition of these works separated by forty years celebrates Dibbets’ prescient work that was often mistaken in this exhibition as a recent work using software flters to add the appearance of scratched flm footage.5

Kimsooja’s seascape in Bottari - Alfa Beach, 2001, is reminiscent of Dibbets’ camera orientation strategy by employing a 180-degree inversion. The low resolution of the digital image creates fattened areas with less detail, subsequently becoming painterly in effect. The ominous dark sea and clouds, reminiscent of romantic painting, are infected with the closing text revealing the signifcance of the site. The geographic and historic external information change the reading of this horizon to evoke the dimensions of modern globalisation that also resonate in the works of João Vasco Paiva, Sim Cheol-Woong, Lauren Brincat, and Craig Walsh. Each of these artists’ work refers to a specifc geographic location or city with histories that impact upon the reading of the site of the horizon. Whether that be in a sacred site for Australian Aboriginals in Craig Walsh’s work, the uses of the Tempelhof Airport in Berlin within Lauren Brincat’s work, or the reframe of imagery of the Han River in Seoul portrayed by Sim Cheol-Woong.

Unique approaches exploring sculptural qualities in the moving image were proposed in new works made for the exhibition. Wang Gongxin’s The Other Rule in Ping Pong, 2014, integrates two projections and a small monitor through perfect triangulated synchronisation. The unexpected and humorous volley between the three image surfaces, complete with precise audio cues, implies a small ball is travelling through three dimensions. While we understand the illusion, the artist forces our eyes to uncomfortably read within a void between the three positions. Another new work, Barbara Campbell’s close, close, 2014, introduced an interactive experience where the viewer’s body in space revealed a partial view of the landscape with corresponding audio zones. A motion sensor detected the changing distance between the viewer and the projection wall enabling the landscape ‘slither view’ to be tentatively explored up and down by moving back or forward in space.

Moving through space was also at issue in The Distance of a Kilometre, 2010, by Zhang Peili. The work sandwiched the viewer between two large projections that revealed the one kilometre journey, walked in real time, from opposing ends of a street. As the two camera views approach a particular area, the image increasingly degrades as electronic interference increases and then subsides to reinstate it agian. Standing between the two screens, the illusion of distance is created and destroyed through the documentation of the walk and the subsequent fat abstraction of the digitally degraded image.

With hundreds of square meters to consider as exhibition space, Zhu Jia chose to create a work for this exhibition that was small and discreet. It’s beyond my control, 2014, projects a recording of a hand delineating a corner with a pencil. The image in 1:1 scale was forced back in a corner of the gallery demonstrating an irreconcilable tension between the representation and actual space. While Dibbets forced the real and the abstract into two dimensions, Zhu Jia chose to consider the problem in three dimensions. The contradiction was well exposed in the projection that resulted not in a rectangle, but an irregular heptagon splayed across the walls and foor. Lauren Brincat also used the juxtaposition of projection and geometry in This Time Tomorrow Tempelhof, 2012 in which a ceiling high timber isosceles triangle supported the rectangular projection screen. The triangular support that referenced the vanishing point in the video, acted as an elemental monument to perspective in actual space.

Moving through the many exhibition venues, some works found quite perfect ready-made situations to be installed such as Yang Zhenzhong’s Passage, 2012. The work was projected on the landing of the main entry staircase in the Guangdong Museum of Art where the architectural lines dramatically emphasised single point perspective adding to the dizzying effect of the camera’s movement forward through space. Yeondoo Jung’s screen monitor diptych Handmade Memories - On the Dividing Line Between Body and Soul, 2008, also explored single point perspective in a complex theatrical construction of space, an illusion built through layers of projection and mixed media, paired with personal commentary.

Wang Peng’s screen monitors in his triptych Beyond, 2014 invokes a quite different approach to space where the concept of distance is poetically used as the creator of space: distance between a man and a woman; distance between the land and the sky; distance between seeing and not seeing. Giovanni Ozzola’s Garage - sometimes you can see much more, 2009-2011, is another visually poetic and sculptural work that plays with light, seeing and not seeing, to heighten and transform our spatial awareness. A garage door methodically rolls up to slowly reveal a sparkling bright ocean horizon that flls the gallery space with an expansive view. The door’s inevitable descent transforms the gallery to semi darkness and the reality being an unoccupied space. It was the moments of transition and the uncertainty of that experience that urged the viewer to look harder and stay longer.

The association of body and awareness of scale were evident qualities in Shilpa Gupta’s 100 Hand Drawn Maps of India, 2007-2008. Gupta utilised a small custom-built table replicating the original drawings’ size to capture the down projection. The experience of peering onto the small glowing tabletop with the steady fow of fade-in fade-out hand drawn maps, conjured the one hundred people and their interpretations of constructed territorial space. The work deftly alerts us to the conceptual foundation of space, that being, an artifcially constructed concept that does not exist independently or universally.

LANDSEASKY: revisiting spatiality in video art was an extraordinary opportunity to bring together a collection of works that emphasised and indeed insisted, the phenomenological and sculptural experience was of paramount importance to critically explore video as a fne art medium rather than a cinematic narrative that could be delivered through any number of interchangeable screen sizes and formats. The brief descriptions of the artists’ works offered here demonstrate the key concerns of the project. However, the brevity inevitably restricts more complex commentary on the individual works and also on the ways the

works were presented, venue-by-venue, in different countries and galleries. The opportunity to present this exhibition in fve cities, in so many different situations and confgurations, was not only a satisfying challenge it was an immense pleasure that would not have been possible without the strength of our partners.

It would not be complete without speaking of the many additional activities that complemented the exhibition and the excellent exhibition support, press conferences, television and media coverage, artists’ interviews and hospitality shown by our hosts at OCAT Shanghai, Art Sonje Center and SAMUSO, The Guangdong Museum of Art, Griffth University Art Gallery, and the National Art School Gallery. Thanks also to the SIVA – Shanghai Institute of Visual Art, Fudan University which hosted the LANDSEASKY symposium, as well as the vast network of artists and galleries in Seoul that contributed and explored many possibilities! An extensive page of thanks is included in this publication to name many other people that contributed to the depth and quality of this project.

It was a privilege to work with the artists and I thank them all sincerely for their artistic contributions, long discussions, suggestions, good humour and support that was so generously offered over the extended three years of development and presentation.

Kim Machan

Artistic Director/Curator of LANDSEASKY exhibition

Notes:

1. ‘Video’ and ‘media art’ are terms used in this essay to refer to moving image and screen-based technologies in general. Video was chosen to evoke the origin of the moving image in contemporary art. 2. Peter Weibel, ‘A Genealogy of Media Art’, in Fan Dian and Zhang Ga eds, Synthetic Times,. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 112-116. 3. Due to government funding cuts the NMAI closed. The web site no longer supports the hundreds of artist’s videos that were once available to preview. 4. Horizon II – Sea (3 channel flm projection) was shown in the solo exhibition ‘Jan Dibbets’, curated by Rudi Fuchs at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands in November 1971. 5. One of the ambitions of this exhibition was to attune viewers to read the medium before them. Dibbets’ work acted as an important reminder of the frst experiments in moving image produced and the sign post back to analyse what we see.

Below: workers installing Heimo Zobernig’s Untitled Nr.23 at OCAT Shanghai.

下图：工作人员在OCAT上海馆安装奥地利艺术家 黑默·佐伯尼格的作品《无题–第23号》。