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I. PARENTHESIS
In March 2000, having just completed the shooting for Éloge de l’amour - whose second half had been done in digital video -, director Jean-Luc Godard gave an interview to the periodical Cahiers du Cinéma [1]. This was a special issue of the magazine, and the idea was to investigate how recent technological, economic and social transformations affect the way cinema is made today. The director, who is normally reluctant about interviews, accepted the request upon one condition: the interviewers should bring him a VHS copy of the film “The Shining”, by Stanley Kubrick.
The dialogue with Godard is difficult from the first round. An initial attempt to make him talk about – among other ‘big issues’ in contemporary cinema – the digital image, the existence of cinema outside the cinema, etc, is followed by a merciless blow: Do you really ask yourselves these questions, or is it simply to exist, to play along, like on television? The interviewers, for their part, still seemed very excited with the idea that one of the most experimental of modern filmmakers was finally exploring the possibilities opened up by new technologies. He, who has thoroughly explored the possibilities of cinema, of analogical video, who has invented a completely original way of making films, would have plunged at last into the brave new world of digital media. And so the question is posed:
Does digital video interest you?
Of course, but I don’t see no reason why we should talk about it.
II. THE TIME-IMAGE
Making use of a theory of cinema to talk about digital video is perhaps an act of corruption, of illegitimacy. After all, video art has its own history, a ‘non-linear lineage’ that can be traced back to the 1960s, and one could even say that there is practically a consensus – among art critics - to classify it within the field of the visual arts. Which does not mean, of course, that the dialogues between video art and cinema are not recurrent and prolific, as in the renowned works of artists such as Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huygue, among others. In the field of cinema things become a bit more complicated. Part entertainment industry, part experimentation, sometimes the product ‘film’ is too slippery to fit into any kind of classification.
My intention here is to put aside, for the time being, the specificities of each medium and to look at the moving image per se and the ways in which it is apprehended. The suggestion is that what is made visible, not only in The Kiss, but also in Leandro Lima and Gisela Motta’s body of work, finds a resonance in philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s writings in Cinema 2. Departing from Henri Bergson’s ontology of images, mainly as set out in Matter and Memory, Deleuze argues that in post war cinema (the first volume, Cinema 1, is dedicated to pre-war cinema) there is an inversion of the sensory-motor scheme of classical cinema where time was subordinated to movement. Classical cinema is characterised by the movement-image, an image that is always linked to an action and therefore necessarily linked to an indirect representation of time. Modern cinema, on its turn, realises its capacity to make visible temporal relationships that can only become visible through the creation of images. It is what Deleuze calls ‘pure optical and sound situations’.
According to the author, the Second World War is a determining factor in this break, for it ‘has greatly increased the situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe. These were ‘any spaces whatever’, deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction. And in these any-spaces-whatever a new race of characters was stirring, a kind of mutant: they saw rather than acted, they were seers.’[2] What happens when the characters no longer know how to act and become seers themselves is the collapse of the action-image of classical cinema. But if action loses its central place, something else comes to replace it. This is the great inversion proposed by Deleuze: it is time - time in a pure state - that dominates modern cinema.
III. THE BODY AS THE DEVELOPER[3]OF TIME
One of the strategies of modern cinema: ‘…sometimes…it is necessary to make holes, to introduce voids and white spaces, to rarefy the image, by suppressing many things that have been added to make us believe that we are seeing everything. It is necessary to make a division or make emptiness in order to find the whole again.’ [4]
There is no sound. There is silence. There are no cuts or different framings. There is the modulation of the image, the unstoppable modulation of the organic substance that traverses the bodies and allows them to meet on the limit imposed by architecture.
The bodies in The Kiss are not the first bodies in Leandro Lima and Gisela Motta’s work. Here they are almost static, immersed in a ceaseless flux and seemingly unconscious. In some other works the bodies move, albeit performing flimsy and repetitive movements neither making an attempt at completing a specific task nor offering us a narrative entry into the image in movement.
‘Give me a body then: this is the formula of philosophical reversal. The body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that which it has to overcome to reach thinking. It is on the contrary that which plunges into or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought, that is life’. [5] <#_ftn5> According to Deleuze, this is the situation of the body in modern cinema: (the body) not as a thinking entity, but as that which provokes us - through its postures and attitudes - to think about what does not belong to the domain of the intellect. Wait and tiredness, in Antonioni’s case; or the disconnected space that becomes reconnected through the attitudes of the bodies, in Cassavetes.
Hence what kind of postures do Lima and Motta’s bodies express? It seems to me that a recurrent theme in many works is the inability to act which, in some respects, actualises the deleuzian scheme of modern cinema. Here the loop, used in many of their pieces, is not merely a technical resource – it is a key element in the construction of the bodies’ attitudes. For those bodies not only don’t know how to act – or when they do their action is minimal – but also seem to be trapped within an insurmountable time and space.
Just like in Deleuze ‘the image itself is the system of relations between its elements, that is, a set of temporal relations whose variable presents only fluxes’, insome cases the body itself is the system of relations between its elements whose variable presents only temporal fluxes. Those are movements inherent to the body and not the intellect: the pulse of breathing or of the circulation of fluids. It is as if the often imperceptible modulation, the microscopic and incessant movement of life was finally made visible – a developer of time.
IV. ARTIFICE AND NATURE
I would like to suggest, however, that the body’s inability to act in the work of Lima and Motta is not restricted to the ability of making visible certain temporal relations, as in Deleuze’s thesis. There is another recurring element whose importance cannot be overlooked. In order to do so, it is necessary to return to the question of digital image, because what is made visible in this case is only possible through the digital manipulation of the image. Godard’s grumpiness is understandable: it is not the medium that determines an artist’s creative capacity. But here the image does not serve as a mere demonstration of technological innovation: it is central in the creation of the bodies’ attitudes.
In The Kiss, temporality is expressed by the molecular movement of nature, but that of an artificially constructed nature. Albeit captured by the camera the body is the only truly natural element. The nature that involves it, however, results from a manipulated image and although this work is more optimistic than the previous ones, the bodies never touch each other and consequently the kiss never happens. There is once more the idea of entrapment which might be the result of the inability to equate the natural and the artificial in a constructed environment where the body no longer knows how to act.
This tension and anxiety emerge from these bodies’ insistence in being incorporated in a constructed environment, before which they do not know how to, or cannot act; or are searching for new postures in the contemporary information society.
If, according to Deleuze ‘cinema does not give us the presence of the body and cannot give us it, this is perhaps also because it sets itself a different objective; it spreads an ‘experimental night’ or a white space over us; it works with ‘dancing seeds’ and a ‘luminous dust’; it affects the visible with a fundamental disturbance, and the world with a suspension, which contradicts all natural perception. What it produces in this way is the genesis of an ‘unknown body’ which we have in the back of our heads, like the unthought in thought, the birth of the visible which is hidden from view.’[6] Likewise, Lima and Motta’s work shows us an ‘unknown body’ whose genesis is tied to digital image, making visible a process which today undergoes increasing acceleration. At this point we are no longer in modern cinema, but somewhere else where a new kind of image is being formed.
[1] Interview republished on Jean-Luc Godard, The Future(s) of Film, Three Interviews 2000/1. Bern: Verlag Gachnang & Springer AG, 2002.
[2] Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The time-image. London: The Athlone Press, 1989. Preface.
[3] Révélateur
[4] p.21, op cit.
[5] p.189, op cit. Deleuze contends that the reversal that took place in cinema repeats the experience of an inversion that happened over several centuries in philosophy, that is, the subordination of time to movement has been reverted.
[6] p.201, op cit.
* Kiki Mazzucchelli is an independent critic and curator who is currently pursuing a PhD at Goldsmiths College.
Eat me is a film composed in two takes: a man's mouth that sucks a round object and a woman's mouth that licks a hot dog sausage. The editing of these two takes follows a mathematical progression. At the start, it uses two metres of film for each take, after which, there is one metre for each, followed by 50 centimetres, and so on, until the point where there is a total fusion between the two plans. The cinematographical-measurement experiment of the late artist Lygia Pape (1927-2004), conducted in 1979, almost a decade before video became a tool available to Brazilian artists, predates what is happening today in videoart. Eat me is not however, being shown in this programme, one that intends to show a selection of recently produced videos by Brazilian artists. But its editing methods touch upon the effects of redundancy and continuity which, for example, bring together today's practices of video looping.
Experiences in measurement and counting determine a large part of today's researches. The programme being shown presents a series of projects in which the video camera is used as a calculating and measuring device. It presents additions, multiplications, subtractions, divisions or even the deconstruction of any equation. Demeasurements. Operations which set themselves up in spaces as diverse as nature, music, the body, urban landscapes, domestic settings and social relationships.
Counting is the central concern of I would prefer yes , by Marilá Daridot, which removes, one by one, the letters of ten words, the meaning of which is always that of negation. It is a system of counting that goes backwards so that the letters are returned to their original positions in the alphabet. The chronometry (completely out of order, obviously), is a device used in Attempt , by Camila Sposati, and other scales appear in this programme: the ‘Pantone' colour scale appears in Color box by Marcio Botner, and Alice Miceli's metric scale also appears. In 99,9... meters sprint , Miceli transfers a mathematical question into the moving image: what is the actual distance between two given points? Here, video forms part of a work in progress named the “Decimal Expansion Project”, and concerns itself with the infinite, using a found footage image of an Olympic race.
However, the programme does not limit itself to the straight lines; instead it looks to escape the straight and narrow. It does not wish to level out; instead it aims to stress differences between artistic ideas. As such, one can look at the accidental mathematics of Meeting with , the game invented by Laura Belem in which fictitious white balls are followed, drawing their lines and noting the collisions they encounter along the courses they take across the green felt of a snooker table.
Half turn, a turn and a half , by Sara Ramo, measures the distance between order and disorder in domestic life. By marking out the path traced by objects within a room in a non-determined space of time, she disrupts her personal space with the meticulousness of someone who is solving a complex operation. In this focused subversion, she creates other oceans of possibility. From this idleness, she finds the fable.
The twosome of PaulaGabriela investigate distances – those between bodies, or identities. The camera in Tube-tunnel attempts to establish the distances between the bodies that are followed and overtaken without ever meeting. In the end, what is at play is the possibility of the transference of identities, a situation which repeats itself in many ways in Homenagem a George Segal , by Lenora de Barros, a video which documents its own subject's progressive transformation in a sculpture by the North-American pop artist. Or again in Gotejando, by Beth Moysés, which suggest the idea of successive generations. The video records an act of giving, in which the elements of a body are subtracted to the advantage of another.
The experiences of measurement and rhythm continue in the editing box. In Face to Face , Kika Nicolela works with the lack of synchronicity between sound and video. Audio tracks are shuffled around, transforming statements into a musical accompaniment to the image. If Lygia Pape edited in metres, XY edits in frames. The piece is a race between masculine and feminine masturbation, taking place within 939 and 1640 frames respectively.
To this videometry are added up the documental works that calculate the lowest common denominator between invention and reality. Marepe pulls an outstanding dance out of a banal situation – his home town's football team warming up – in which counting and movement click together in a spectacular situation. The actions recorded by Marcelo de Campo also situate themselves at the boundaries between the real and the imaginary. In homage to Godard, A Bout de Souffle presents a test of asphyxiation, which provokes the same doubts as the reality of the images of violence and torture broadcast by television. The video also exposes a concern about the limits of physical resistance. While some present the infinite, others provide the limits.
The all-seeing camera in Unus Mundus – Round the World , by Cinthia Marcelle, operates between the banal and the extraordinary. The video starts by showing a typical scene in which “nothing happens” and which we have become used to calling “normal”. From the absence of anything, there emerges a choreographed movement of VW campervans, which move together, circling a town square. The inexorable routine is upset by its own repetition. The piece presents the idea of the circle, the circuit, the return, the system, the loop, which also appears in the perfect rotations of Lacrimacorpus , by Janaina Tschäpe, and is less evident in Richard , by Dora Longo Bahia and Anne Marie Peña, in which the guitar player never manages to escape the two harmonies.
Division and sharing of space. Peaceful co-existence in the large urban centres. These are the challenges which are presented in Os Raimundos, os Severinos e os Franciscos by Dias & Riedweg, where ten people share the internal space of a cube, without one life jostling or disturbing any other. The cube reconstructs the rooms where the doormen of the rich São Paulo apartment buildings live and forms part of an installation mounted for the 24 th Bienal de São Paulo, making up a collective portrait pictured from personal stories. Somehow, the cube could be seen as a picture frame. These lives are framed within the patterns of a social group.
The frame is the area of research undertaken by Lucas Bambozzi in Postcards. His project in progress consists of using a video camera to recreate the best-known postcard images of the cites he has visited over the past few years. From the same angle or from a wider point of view, the artist attempts to define something between the obvious and the personal in each image that is photographed. Within the globalised landscape, he looks for the regional. In BMG-8970 , Raquel Kogan and Lea van Steen's camera and car follow a mirror installed in the body of a truck. To a framed city, it is added here an inverted and moving image, what creates an unstable and chaotic vision of the urban context.
In the visualisation of the city, there is created an inverted and moving image creating an unstable and chaotic vision of the urban context.
Instability is the effect also provoked by De revolutionbus orbium coelestium, by the duo of Leandro Lima and Gisela Motta, in which the camera accompanies the movements of a child jumping on a ball. Fixed in the central frame, the ball represents the Earth, at the time when Copernicus' positioning of the Sun at the centre of the solar system still wasn't accepted. By making a digital collage of images of the Earth as seen by satellite, Leandro and Gisela play with the observer's stability.
Lia Chaia also challenges the scales in blowing up a balloon printed with stars and calls her video Big Bang . These are coincidental proposals with distinct mediums: one deals with technology, the other with the precarious. Playing around with cheap, perishable and vulgar materials takes us again to the generation of Lygia Pape, which, stimulated by political questions, negated the institutional space and the art system to launch itself into everyday life and inaugurate an aesthetic of precariousness which is found in the cameras of Lia Chaia, Sara Ramo and Camila Sposati. It is in the “flaws” and the “defects”, and in the disarticulation of technology that the essential qualities of these works are hidden.
May 2006
1. Plain, clean, concise images. Possessing undeniable formal and technical accuracy, the images created by
Leandro Lima and Gisela Motta delude the viewer: their ambiguity is not easily apprehended, for they are protected
by an apparent transparency. But there is something there, a remaining discomfort: back rumour, subtle trembling.
2. The girl swings (Sem título #4 – Untitled #4, 1999). A banal image, repetitive in its naivety. Image-cliché: countless
comings and goings. However, there is something strange about this so familiar scene, something produced by
minimal displacements: saturated colours, artificial landscape, abstracted girl. The oblique framing, the convex look.
And there, between what has been minimally displaced, the world intensely becomes another. The swing,
the landscape, the movement, the camera, the look: from cliché to vertigo, everything seems loose.
3. If the green colour is the greenest in the world (Leminski), what to say about this impossible green?
(Verde.dxf – Green.dxf, Lima, 2004) When it is artificially stamped on the grass, the paradox establishes itself:
this colour is so green that this world cannot be the one we know!
And how about this blue, bluer than the blue colour itself? Geometrically divided into two: the sea, the sky,
the white line. Horizontal blue. If Klein Blue – Yves Kleinʼs hallmark – is the material blue of paint, the body and
the performance, and if the blue of Magritteʼs skies was purposely rarefied, stylised and oneiric, this Blue.dxf
(Azul.dxf, Lima, 1998/2002) is pure synthesis: it seems to exist only as a result of a combination of digits.
The colours blue, green, red and yellow form a synthetic landscape in Leandro and Giselaʼs photographs, videos
and installations. An ambiguous landscape: so similar and, at the same time, so distant from the natural world.
4. Water is a constant (Analógico #2 – Analogical #2, 1998; Sem título #5 – Untitled #5, 2002). It flows and re-flows,
sounds and resounds. But its fluidity is imprisoned in an endless loop. Again, there is a synthetic environment,
as the water of the laboratories (that was fiction in the old days, but now is often in the daily news), where all kinds
of raw materials are synthesized, and organic matters are created and duplicated.
5. In Analógico #3 (Analogical #3, Lima, 1998), the electronic water of a swimming pool made of pixels. Isnʼt that
our situation between the images? Drift, immersion, dive, Drowning (Afogamento, Motta, 2003). Sensory experience,
more than a merely visual one.
6. In Leandro and Giselaʼs work, the loop becomes a poetical strategy: it is economical, automatic, circular; it impedes
the image to refer to a possible past or to succeed in constructing a future image. In loop mode, the image cannot
narrate or foresee. It only displays itself, it exhibits its automatism. As if the world machine had stopped working,
unable to produce new experiences.
But if the loop is repetition, the difference is produced by the encounter between the thought and the work.
The repetition does not stop, but the viewerʼs thought flows continuously. And the circle becomes an ellipse, for,
during the repetition, the image is being constantly altered by different thoughts. As the well-known Heraclitusʼ river:
always the same and always another.
7. The landscape is a natural one; the scene is simple, transparent: some people taking a walk between the trees of
a wood (Que é de? – That is of?, 2003). But, as in Magritteʼs Carte Blanche (1965), this between becomes an
interstice where the beings disappear. Between: interface, space for passing. As if the reality was full of cuts through
which the beings could cross to other invisible, unknown, fantastic domains.
But if Magritteʼs landscape is intense and intentionally oneiric and surreal, Leandro and Giselaʼs wood is between
banality and fantasy, ordinary reality and imagination. The installation becomes more ambiguous with the device
created for this work: the image appears only when it is projected on the viewerʼs shadow. A complex game of
appearing and disappearing, of visible and invisible worlds.
8. The wood is removed, but there are still people passing by. In this work (Marrom, Brown, 2002), as simple as
disconcerting, the visitors are filmed while they go through the exposition (“now the objects perceive me”, Paul Klee
would say). In the projection, people are passing by from one place to another, but there is no scenery. That can be
any place: an exposition? A shopping centre? A studio where a TV commercial is being filmed? The scene becomes
even faker with the use of chroma key.
It is not necessary to cut the landscape, for it has already been removed: from the image as a place of transit to
the image as a non-place. Or a nowhere place.
9. What is expected from a body? That it lives. What is expected from a performance? That it happens. In the
(almost or anti-) performances by Leandro and Gisela (Sem título #1, 2, 3 – Untitled #1, 2, 3), the body simply
does not respond. Or, when it does respond, it is taken over by a disturbing automatism (or autism).
Automaton-body, strange body. Body in loop mode.
10. Or a body upside-down (Interlúdio – Interlude, 2003), lying on its own carapace, unable to turn over to its
natural position (impossible not to think about Gregor Samsa).
11. How strange is this world created by Gisela and Leandro: disconcerting, fantastic, paradoxical. Echos of
a revisited surrealism? I donʼt think so. After all, the real world surpassed the surreal one a long time ago.
What these works suggest goes beyond it: strange is this world, our world. Transformed into an artifice, a synthesis,
a simulation, it seems to be definitely in loop mode. It is the artistʼs role (and not only the artistʼs) to tear, to cut,
to open ways: to make hybrid, permeable universes of the natural and the artificial, the organic and the synthetic,
the alive and the non-alive.
12. As a lotus flower (made of digits) being born and re-born on the skin.