In 1949 the southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Conner wrote her first novel Wise Blood. In 2011 we made Facebook (‘I just don’t like your face’). What’s the connection? … Ronald Reagan, obviously.
Let’s back up. If you read Wise Blood you may be struck by how many times the word ‘face’ crops up — and all the different ways that the face is used to describe characters, sum up situations, allude to emotions and, generally, conjure up some of the most surreal images we have ever encountered. Here are some examples:
‘His black hat sat on his head with a careful, placed expression and his face had a fragile look as if it might have been broken and stuck together again, or like a gun no one knows is loaded.’ (p. 44)
‘His face behind the windshield was sour and frog-like; it looked as if it had a shout closed up in it; it looked like one of those closet doors in gangster pictures where someone is tied to a chair behind it with a towel in his mouth.’ (p. 57)
Intrigued by O’Conner’s text, to say the least, we decided to pull out all of the instances of the word ‘face’ that appear in the book. There are 130 in total, which you can read here:
All of the Faces in Wise Blood
We then decided that we would use this text to make our own book – our own face book! And this is where Ronald Reagan comes in. (Who better to be a face? For is he not the face of Hollywood? Of government? Of trickling economics, cold wars and Star Wars? Perfect!) The next step in the process was to find Ronald Reagan’s face, which we did in the movie The Killers.
The Killers, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story of the same name, stars Ronald Reagan in his last ever acting role before entering politics – and the only screen role in which Reagan starred as a villain. This seemed like the perfect way to frame our textual snippets, and so we set about taking film stills out of the movie that show Ronald Reagan’s face. We then edited this selection so that it formed some kind of visual narrative. (Keeping the stills in the sequence of the film helped …) Finally, we selected ‘faces’ from O’Conner’s book to pair with these stills, layering the visual image with the poetic image.
The effect nuances the meaning of both images while generating an alternate – complex – narrative structure out of their juxtaposition, read in sequence. The the result is Facebook (‘I Just don’t like your face’).
Editing LA Tapped
2011
Something strange happened when we were editing LA Tapped – the film version of our site-specific performance tap dancing at the Bonaventure Hotel. As we were deciding how we might edit the clips together, we tried different things like speeding the clips, merging them, slowing them down … This latter one, slowing down the sequences, had a very strange effect: it sounded like gun fire, bombing, shelling. It was uncanny. We decided that this would be something that we could ‘play’ with in the final edit of the film. Would it be possible to amplify this effect and, in doing so, suggest a relationship between our original performance and, well, war? (After all, there is one waging right now, lest we forget …)
It might seem like a big leap for such minute legs, but we decided to try and make it. We did so by focusing on the mediation itself. That is, rather than the film version of our site-specific performance being understood to evidence the ‘reality’ of the original performance — to document the ‘real’ event — we wanted to take this footage with all of its potential associations (Los Angeles, Hollywood, media; The Bonaventure, or ‘the good fortune’, bling, economics; tap dancing, vaudeville, fun, carefree) and layer it with another film in order to generate a complex message that could communicate our ideas.
Only one clip from this other layer is seen in the film of LA Tapped, although the sound and refrain of ‘keep shootin” echoes throughout. So, what comprises this ‘other layer’? It is, we think appropriately, The War You Don’t See by John Pilger. We highly recommend that you watch the full documentary, which can be found here: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/war-you-dont-see/. And as you watch, we encourage you to bear in mind this quote from Judith Butler’s equally excellent and relevant book The Frames of War:
‘So there is no way to separate, under present historical conditions, the material reality of war from those representational regimes through which it operates and which rationalize its own operation.’ – Judith Butler, Frames of War (2009)
‘The image makes palpable a unity in which manifold different elements are contiguous and reach over into each other.’
– Andrei Tarkovsky
Parrhesia in Rome
2011
‘We must listen to the voices that seem useless. In brains full of long sewage pipes of schooled wall, tarmac and welfare papers the buzzing of insects must enter’
- Domenico in Nostalghia
After working on the project for three years, we decided that the final outcome for Gorchakov’s Wish would take the shape of a tri-partite video work and separate piece of writing, with the respective parts of both the video and written work responding to one of the final three scenes of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. For the video piece, specifically, we decided that we wanted to pair the footage of ‘Immolation Triptych II’, shot in-studio at the Centre for Creative Collaboration, with footage shot at the site of the ‘original’ filmic locations for Nostalghia. These sites include:
- Campidoglio (Rome, Italy)
- Santa Catarina Pool (Bagno Vignoni, Italy)
- San Galgano Ruin (San Galgano, Italy)
At this point in the project we already had footage shot on-location at the Santa Catarina Pool (see ‘Alba Lunedi‘). We also had footage shot on-location at San Galgano, which we had taken during one of our site visits to Italy. However, what we still needed was footage shot at the Campidoglio in Rome. So, we headed to Rome!
We decided that, for the shot, we would do a bit of an ‘intervention’ into the public square of Campidoglio by making a sandwich board that said THE BUZZING OF INSECTS MUST ENTER on one side and (translating this line of text using Google translate) IL RONZIO DELLI INSETTI DEVONO ENTRARE on the other and wearing this around the square. We made the sign during the day and, at around 6pm, headed to the square for the performance.
After doing one circle around the square — and being informed by a very kind Italian man that the grammar of our Italian was totally incorrect — we were met by approximately 10 carabinieri (i.e. police) as well as some plain clothes officers. It would have been an excellent filming opportunity given that we were generating footage for the section Parrhesia; however, unfortunately, one of the officers shoved down the nose of our camera almost instantly. As it turns out, one cannot display text in any public square in Rome unless going through a rather rigorous procedure with the police — oops. (What was even more surprising was that we were also told to take off and ‘put into the rubbish’ the other sandwich board we had made that, referencing the mime in the scene with Domenico’s speech, was blank.) We left Campidoglio, repentant.
The following day we displayed our sign at the following public squares around Rome:
- Campo de Fiori
- Piazza Navona
- Piazza della Rotonda
- Piazza di Trevi
- Piazza Barberini
- Piazza del Popolo
- Piazza San Pietro
‘An image is not a certain meaning … but the entire world reflected as in a drop of water’
– Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
We decided to use our one-week residency at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in London as a means of finalising our work on the project Gorchakov’s Wish. However, after completing the residency and viewing the results, we realised that we actually needed one more layer to add to our final output. (More on that in subsequent posts.) As such, we began to understand the work that we did at the Centre as, in fact, a further development of our live performance ‘Immolation Triptych‘. Indeed, not unlike Fall (An Allegory) I & II, the first of which was performed live and the second performed in-studio specifically for video, the first ‘Immolation Triptych’ — developed in response to all three of the final scenes from Nostalghia – was performed for a live audience, while this further iteration was designed, constructed and performed in order to produce a moving image. We therefore titled this iteration of work ‘Immolation Triptych II’.
To be accurate, we actually produced three moving image sequences, each responding to one of the three final scenes of Tarkovsky’s film.
Sequence 1: Parrhesia
This sequence responds to the scene in Nostalghia where the mathematician and madman Domenico, Gorchakov’s alter ego, dies by his own hand: a harrowing act of self-immolation at the climax of his inflammatory public speech delivered from atop the statue of Marcus Aurelius sitting on a horse in the piazza of Rome’s Capitoline Hill. Parrhesia records Domenico’s speech translated into Irish and performed against the backdrop of a still image of the Duke of Wellington sitting on a horse in front of the Bank of England. (The Latin word parrhesia, refers to the willingness to speak out publically, even to one’s own detriment, as theorised by the philosopher Michel Foucault in a series of lectures collected together in the book Fearless Speech.)
Sequence 2: Allegory of the Five Elements
This sequence responds to the penultimate scene of Nostalghia where the protagonist, the exiled poet Gorchakov, carries the lit candle across the Santa Catarina Pool. Based largely on ‘Fall (An Allegory) II’, this iteration extends that previous work by incorporating and synthesising complementary allegorical ‘logics’ as were developed throughout the course of the project, primarily through the written component of Gorchakov’s Wish. Comprised of image, object, action and text, the sequence is recorded through the signature style of Tarkovsky’s long take and tracking shot.
Sequence 3: Elegy
This sequence responds to the final scene of the film which superimposes two images: one of a ruined cathedral in the Tuscan town of San Galgano and, inside of this, another of a Russian dacha suggesting Gorchakov’s native homeland. Elegy creates a visual analogue of this shot, first, by carefully designing and constructing a film set made up of the bespoke plexiglass box first used in Kino Haiku; a convex mirror reflecting its surroundings; a flat-screen TV displaying footage shot on location at Bagno Vignoni. The construction is then animated through a long-take and tracking shot that, recorded within the tight confines of the black box designed and constructed for Kino Haiku, transforms the spatial construction into a Tarkovskyan film image.
As with previous work, our intention was to engage with the complexity of meaning in Tarkovsky’s originals film images as generated through through: (1) an emphasis on the durational aspects of the film image through the stylistic deployment of a filmic syntax; (2) the choice (and spatial design or manipulation) of a specific filmic location or place; (3) a poetic message derived from a semiotic practice involving language, objects and/or actions. And, informed by all of the iterations of work that we had done thus far in the project, we employed strategies of reconstruction and allegorisation in order to reconfigure and recontextualise the scenes, thereby referencing – and stylistically emulating – but nevertheless detourning the message of Tarkovsky’s original work.
‘In a world where there is a real threat of a war capable of annihilating mankind; where social ills exist on a staggering scale; where human suffering cries out to heaven – the way must be found for one person to reach another.’
– Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
In December, University College London hosted an international, interdisciplinary conference entitled Sexuate Subjects: Politics, Poetics, Ethics. The conference sought “to generate new theories and practices of subjectivity – ‘sexuate subjects’ – through contemporary poetic and political research in the visual arts, humanities and social sciences, and with reference to Luce Irigaray’s theory of ‘sexuate difference’.” Taking part in the panel Understanding Difference: why poetry matters we presented work relating to the Gorchakov’s Wish project.
Specifically, we presented a conference paper extending the ideas that we explored in ‘Constructing Atmospheres: A Phenomenology of the Film Image and Its Relation to Place’. Where that previous paper explores the relationship between the film image, time and the place of its original filmic location, this paper explores the film image as a projection and its relation to the viewer. Titling the paper ‘Time, Space and Empathy: A Material Poetics of the Film Image’, we explored how a viewer’s relationship to the screen constructs a dialogical space: an intersubjective space of ‘shared viewing’ and ‘shared experience’; a meaningful space of imagination, cognition and feeling; an embodied space where mediation, itself, becomes an object of contemplation.
We used our analysis of Tarkovsky’s film image to address the question ‘Why Poetry Matters?’ and, linking our presentation with the conference agenda, made our argument with reference to the work of Luce Irigaray. Here is a quote taken from the paper in which we make such a link: “Bearing this in mind, might the ‘curious’ sense of empathy that we feel in relation to the scene with Gorchakov and the candle, as we alluded to at the start of this essay, be ascribed less to our symbolic reading of the flame held by Gorchakov, as per Pallasmaa’s suggestion, than to our embodied engagement with the screen space itself? What Bird describes, with specific reference to Tarkovsky’s work, as a “sensate membrane of material forces, eliciting from the viewer not only intellectual participation but also physical presence”? In other words, can we appreciate how the address of the eye speaks to us through the fire of the flame, the earth of the stone, evaporated water of the steam as well as that other element, air. What philosopher Luce Irigaray describes in The Forgetting of Air as “irreducibly constitutive of the whole, [that] compels neither the faculty of perception nor that of knowledge to recognize it” (1983, p. 8). (cont’d)
Air. “Always there, it allows itself to be forgotten,” Irigaray laments (1983, p. 8). But have we not been engaging with the air throughout this poet’s journey? Virtually, in the memory of the scene of Domenico’s inflammatory speech. Visually, in the belch of steam, gust of wind, flicker of flame all framed by the long take and tracking shot. Perceptually, in the mediation – presumed transparent, but exposed as, in fact, reflective through its re-mediation by the lamplight of the projected image. Also between us, the material space we share and breathe and through which voice travels to tympanum, across ossicles, toward the oval window of another’s inner ear where we make our appearance, both body and story. In a shared space such as this – a complex construct of imagination, cognition, perception and affect – the air is not forgotten, being always felt.”
As part of our presentation we showed a video piece that worked in tandem with the paper to communicate our ideas. ‘To forget : Of air’ gathers together footage shot at the Santa Catarina Pool in Bagno Vignoni, Italy – the original location for the penultimate scene of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983). The piece, which includes footage shot during return visits to the pool at different times of the year (Spring, Summer and Winter), attempts to capture the atmospheric conditions of the place across time through the moving image. The work specifically attempts to capture the interaction of light, mist, steam and moisture, using the area of the Bagno Vignoni pool as a frame of reference.
As well as a document of the changing Italian light, the work documents more localised thresholds of time, such as dawn and dusk, as well as major yearly thresholds including the New Year celebrations which are accompanied by Fireworks and a live brass band, the sounds of which is stretched to provide the soundtrack to the work.
Kreider + O’Leary, Memento Mori (2010): page proof for artists’ pages.
Over the past number of years we have worked on projects in Japan (Video Shakkei), Italy (Gorchakov’s Wish) and Ireland (Eight Rooms). During our visits to each of these locations we have often stopped to engage with places of cultural and spiritual significance including holy wells, cemetaries and burial sites – an act of observation, perhaps contemplation … Memento Mori is a series of word-and-image composites relating to this experience.
The images are photographs taken at the following locations:
- Isola di San Michele (‘Island of the Dead’) in Venice, Italy
- Daigh Bhríde (St. Brigid’s Well) in Liscannor, County Clare, Ireland
- A burial site in Tenryu-ji (天龍寺) in Ukyo Ward, Kyoto, Japan
The text, some of which is comprised of found materials from the specific locations, is a poetic meditation on death and remembrance. The writing itself engages with a spatial practice of the page inspired by the manuscripts of Emily Dickinson and, in particular, her employment of ‘variants’ – words and phrases outside of the poetic boundary that can be substituted for other words and phrases in the body of the poem.
The series will be published as a sequence of artists’ pages in a forthcoming issue of Performance Research.
Kreider + O’Leary, LA Tapped (2009): still image of performance at Bonaventure Hotel.
We were recently in LA – Venice Beach, the Sunset Strip, Hollywood … The sun was shining, the buildings were gleaming and the cars continually spat out fumes while passengers inside rocked on to personal stereo systems. Everyone seemed fit, healthy and relatively well-off – a city glistening amidst the economic gloom of global recession and state bankruptcy. Perfect place for a tap dance!
We set up camp in the Bonaventure Hotel – a hyperspace maze, ‘city within a city’ – designed by architect and developer John Portman and completed in 1976.
Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, CA.
This is the largest hotel in LA and has been featured in numerous films and television shows including Strange Days , Blue Thunder, This is Spinal Tap, In the Line of Fire, Nick of Time, True Lies, Midnight Madness, Showtime, Hard to Kill, Chuck and classics like Buck Rogers in the 25th Century!
(The Bonaventure has also been featured in CSI.)
In his seminal essay ‘Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ literary critic and Marxist political theorist Frederic Jameson discusses the Bonaventure as an exemplar of postmodernist space, concluding that ‘this latest mutation in space – postmodern hyperspace – has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.’ Jameson’s words rang in our ears as we tapped into, around and through the Bonaventure.
Kreider + O’Leary, LA Tapped (2009): composite of video stills from performance documentation.
And, as we continue work of the piece – editing together the performed sequences, adding in other elements – we shall surely hear an echo of Jameson’s final claim that this ‘alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment’ can be seen as the ‘symbol and analogue of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentred communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.’
Kreider + O’Leary, Video Shakkei Post-Performance Drawings (2010): entrance view.
+ Related to Video Shakkei series of performances in Japan.
We were invited by The International Centre for Drawing at RMIT Melbourne to produce a number of large-scale drawing works as part of the Drawing Out festival and conference in Melbourne, Australia, during April. In response, we decided to generate a number of ‘post-performance’ drawings related to Video Shakkei, reflecting our process and practice of site-specific performance and time-based drawing throughout the project. There are five drawings in total, each drawn directly onto a wall panel of approximately 3m x 5m and interlinked in a vertically ascending space. These are currently being exhibited at RMIT Melbourne for six weeks.
The drawings were each generated in a sequence of five stages, the first three of which were realised remotely in conjunction with Fine Art students at RMIT. Throughout the months of March and April we issued three successive sets of instructions to the students, each relating to one ‘layer’ of the drawings.
Kreider + O’Leary, Video Shakkei Post-Performance Drawings (2010): 3-stage instructions for drawing 1.
Our aim was to build up a palimpsest of references related to site-based drawing practices that had influenced our process and practice while working on Video Shakkei (e.g. Piranesi‘s Antichità Romane, Hiroshi Hara‘s contemporary architectural drawings and our own notational sketches for performance in Japan).
The final stage was completed by ourselves on-site in Melbourne. Here, just as we had done for the installation of Video Shakkei at The Centre for Drawing in London, we introduced an aesthetics of the Japanese garden into our work – including the element of shakkei or ‘borrowed landscape’.
Kreider + O’Leary, Video Shakkei Post-Performance Drawings (2010): exhibition preparation.
First we stripped back each of the drawings using layers of white wash, thereby ‘editing out’ certain aspects of the drawings’ history while leaving others to remain visible. This content was then edited together with phrases cut from vinyl lettering describing the filmic syntax that we employed for the ‘live drawing’ practice of Video Shakkei as well as words that, naming various elements of Japanese garden design (e.g. ‘frame’, ‘pool’, ‘tree’, ‘grid’, ‘rock’), became the basis for the compositional logic of each respective drawing. The final result is a series of five seemingly sparse word-and-image composites that: include (i.e. ‘borrow’) framed elements from the drawings’ (and, hence, the project’s) referential layers; allude to our process and practice of ‘live drawing’ in the performance of Video Shakkei; and embody an aesthetics of Japanese garden design in the final incarnation of the work.
Kreider + O’Leary, Video Shakkei Post-Performance Drawings (2010): stair detail.
Kreider + O’Leary, Video Shakkei Post-Performance Drawings (2010): wall detail.
Bernard Tschumi, Manhattan Transcripts (1978) and Kreider + O’Leary, Video Shakkei (2009)
+ Related to Video Shakkei series of performances in Japan.
Reflecting on our practice and process throughout Video Shakkei we wrote ‘Video Shakkei: Event-Space, Performance and Time-Based Drawing’ exploring the nature of the ‘captured’ architectural drawing and, in doing so, proposing a relationship between architectural site, performative action and time-based drawing. We have just presented the paper at the Drawing Out Conference at RMIT in Melbourne Australia (7-10 April), where it was published as part of the conference proceedings.
Kreider + O’Leary, Video Shakkei (2009): Installation at The Centre for Drawing.
Click for: Video Shakkei Exhibition Invite
supported by the UAL Research Fund and The Irish Arts Council
+ Related to Video Shakkei series of performances in Japan.
Culminating our residency in The Project Space at The Centre for Drawing we present Video Shakkei in the form of an installation work. The work incorporates video compositions relating to seven of our fourteen performances in Japan, as well as materials reflecting on this experience that were generated throughout our residency. The resulting environment of image, object and text opens up the system of features we are calling ‘our’ Japan to a viewer’s enactment and interpretation. The following text and image sequence documents the installation.
ii.
There was sky and now this:
a hole punched circular to clouds;
adjunct reflections making space in folds;
mechanistic array of framework’s film-like possibilities.
(All of this was etched onto glass, like architecture.)
Kreider + O’Leary in The Project Space (2009).
+ Related to Video Shakkei series of performances in Japan.
We are working as artists-in-residence in The Project Space at The Centre for Drawing throughout August, taking stock of our recent trip to Japan. This experience will culminate in an exhibition at the start of September.
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Drawing as Thinking and Action
‘But matter in the volatile state is still matter, and by virtue of being controlled, compressed and divided on the paper – which it instantly brings to life – it acquires a special power. Its variety, moreover, is extreme: ink, wash, lead pencil, charcoal, red chalk, crayon, whether singly or in combination, all constitute so many distinct traits, so many distinct languages.’
- Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art
Drawing is thinking made manifest: a graphic record of thought and intention. The line draws distinctions, cleaving a space from the conceptual void; it delineates entities, trajectories and boundaries. The line is a thread, propelled by thought, that moves and mutates with the process of plastic creation. As a reflection of thought, the line is loose, free and open at the start of the creative process – a capricious and un-tethered thing, sometimes wildly and exuberantly speculative, sometimes coldly rational and utilitarian – only to become more defined, located and precise as the process continues.
Kreider + O’Leary, Video Shakkei (2009): Drawings in The Project Space.
Drawing is also, of course, a verb – a bodily action; more usually a sequence of actions that deposits traces between the maker and the medium of the drawing. The history of drawing is the history of mark making – figures darkening a surface or ground. Although drawing is itself an act, it is frequently related to displaced acts, usually beyond the realm of drawing.
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‘Our Japan’
‘If I want to imagine a fictive nation, I can give it an invented name, treat it declaratively as a novelistic object … I can also – though in no way claiming to represent or to analyze reality itself (these being the major gestures of Western discourse) – isolate somewhere in the world (faraway) a certain number of features (a term employed by linguistics), and out of these features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I shall call: Japan.’
- Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs.
Working with materials found both inside and outside of The Project Space – leftovers from other artists’ process left in cabinets and by the skip – we have set up a kind of imaginary landscape modelled on the aesthetic of the landscape gardens encountered and engaged with on our trip.
Kreider + O’Leary, Video Shakkei (2009): Assemblage in The Project Space.
Sugarcubes. Rocks. Bricks. Wire. Mirror. Lead. Each of these elements are becoming signs in the system we are calling ‘our Japan’, based on the following features:
+ Eki – The art of locating through Geomancy
+ Shimenawa 標縄– Bound Territory / Sacred Space
+ Haiku 俳句 – Poetic form
+ Engawa 縁側 – Transitional space
+ Shakkei 借景 – Borrowed scenery
So the room becomes a space of (and for) reflection …
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Composition and Frame
‘Partial control is exercised through the use of the frame. Each frame, each part of a sequence qualifies, reinforces, or alters the parts that precede and follow it. The associations so formed allow for a plurality of interpretations rather than a singular fact.’
- Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction
We are using our residency and the facilities at The Centre for Drawing – namely, a bank of 14 Macs – to edit together the video composites documenting our performances in Japan, each of which was recorded using three-to-four different cameras simultaneously. (N.B. Stills from video composites for Video Shakkei are now incorporated into posts below.)
In producing these composite videos we are thinking of how the shakkei in traditional Japanese gardens is framed by the architecture of the engawa.
View from Hosenin Temple, Kyoto.
We are also inspired by the split screen film of Woodstock (1970) that we just watched, Peter Greenaway’s Pillow Book (1996), the infamous Bladerunner (1982, dir. by Ridley Scott) with all of its reflective surfaces and screens in space – and we’ve been watching a lot of CSI Miami lately …
Kreider + O’Leary, Video Shakkei (2009): performance preparation.
Drawing from the Japanese practice of shakkei, or ‘borrowed landscape,’ we visited a number of carefully selected sites in Japan – from ancient Shinto spaces of ritual in Ise to the hyper-futuristic Umeda Sky building in Osaka – to perform a sequence of actions or ‘live drawings’ in response to the spatial and material qualities of each location. (See posts below.) The actions were recorded simultaneously from differing points of view using two hand-held and two miniature high definition video cameras. Edited together as a series of filmic composites modeled on the multi-scaled architectural drawing, the result is a series of hyper-digitized, absurdly choreographed and poetically rendered filmic images of place relating the landscape or architectural space to performed event, and this to narrative sequence.
Equipment
We employed the following equipment throughout the project:
1 x Sonycam HD DV camcorder
1 x Handycam HD DV camcorder
4 x Micro DV cameras
1 x Nikon D300 digital SLR
This equipment was used to record the performances. The cameras were also envisioned as a kind of prop, with ourselves as ‘absurd tourists’.
Props
Other props used in the performances include:
2 x convex mirrors
2 x hand-held mirrors
2 x cosmetic mirrors
2 x blue ribbons (50 & 10mm x 5m)
2 x blue ribbons (50 & 10mm x 5m)
In addition to cultivating an aesthetic for our work, these objects are laden with symbolic value in Japanese culture.
Mirror in centre of Shinto shrine in Japan.
Festival ribbons in a public square in Japan.
We anticipate that they will also begin take on symbolic value / specific significance in our work as we use them iteratively in each performance. (For a sign to become a sign it must be repeated at least once …)
Uniform
We devised a uniform worn at all times throughout the performances:
k: black trousers, black top, gold bib
j: blue trousers, blue top, silver bib
This was partly to fit in – the uniforms themselves resonate with certain aspects of Japanese culture.
Workers in Osaka (left); Zen monk (right).
And partly to stand out – to be identified.
Japanese Manga characters.
Kreider + O’Leary, Video Shakkei (2009): Umeda Sky Building, performance no.1.
+ Part of the Video Shakkei series of performances in Japan.
Performance no. 1 takes place at Umeda Sky Building (梅田スカイビル Umeda Sukai Biru) in Osaka, designed by architect Hiroshi Hara. Hara’s building has been tugging on the imagination for some time as an icon of dynamic, punctured, post-everything sequence of spaces. This is the new urbanism: both post and pre-apocalyptic, reminiscent of older things , but pointing ahead. Ahead, in this case, is very much upwards.
Kreider + O’Leary, Video Shakkei (2009): video composite still, performance no. 1.
Satellite image of Umeda Sky Building.
Kreider + O’Leary, Video Shakkei (2009): Shingonshu Honpukuji, performance no. 2.
+ Part of the Video Shakkei series of performances in Japan.
The site for Performance no. 2 is Shingonshu Honpukuji (真言宗本福寺水御堂), also known as the Water Temple, designed by architect Tadao Ando and located on Awaji Island in Japan’s Inland Sea. Associated with an existing Temple of the Shingon Sect, this new addition to the Temple precinct is ordered by a dynamically unfolding sequence of spaces – a series of spatial contractions and releases – to calibrate the approach to the new building, as one rises up the hill. the final bodily rotation reveals the dramatic opening out of the elliptical pond of water lilies, which one descends through to enter the temple proper. The experience is of immersion in a concrete cave of vermilion and gold.
Perpformance no. 2 was conduted in the penultimate ascending space before the water reveals itself. As with all of our performances in Video Shakkei, this one involves two figures moving in relation to the geometry and lines of force suggested by the spatial envelope. We are interested in the simultaneous recording of these actions from numerous points of view. Props interrupt, reflect, filter and trace the actions involved.
