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’).

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)

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

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 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.

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.

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.’

+ 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.

+ 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.

ABSTRACT Event-Space, Performance, Time-Based Drawing