- Venue
- Guest Projects, London
- Location
- London
I have been asked to contribute a short text to Natalie Sanders’ and Rebecca Glover’s collaborative research project on video sculpture. However, since I was unfortunately neither physically nor virtually present at any of the symposia, exhibitions or events, it would seem disingenuous to write in any capacity about the research project itself. I feel this task should be – and, if I am not mistaken indeed is – left to the participants. Inspired by the discussion on the project’s tumblr page, which is organized around a series of questions, what I thought I’d offer here are some tentative notes on what it might entail to think about video sculpture today more generally – about its presuppositions, about its internal logic, its implications; to be sure, though, these are not so much answers as that they are suggestions for further research. Because many of the questions pertain to space – “can we encounter video sculpture as between-and-becoming virtual and actual spaces?”, “is video-sculpture ever a seamless combination of object and moving image?”, “does animation expand the sculpture field or endanger it?”, “can video be used purely as material or it is always to some, or a great extent, an ‘object’?”, “how does the spatial immobility of a viewer in mainstream cinema affect an encounter with video-sculpture installation?” – my focus here lies with space.
- Video sculpture explicates the space of video by reiterating the space of sculpture.
As their name suggests, video sculptures perform two distinct spaces at once: the usually disavowed space of the video screen – the tube television or the flat screen, in a cupboard or on the wall – and the emphasized space of the sculptural form. To be sure, I use the term ‘perform’ consciously here, as opposed to, say, ‘inhabit’, or ‘occupy’, since spaces are not a priori containers; they exist exclusively in their iteration, even if, or especially when, that iteration is provoked by the parameters of the place. You might say that video sculpture performs, regardless of its specific strategies and materials, one medium through the other: the video screen is made present by means of the sculptural practice. If this transposition draws attention to the extent to which video is always already spatial, virtually as well as actually, it also suggests that the video screen exists here exclusively in its displacement, in the abnegation of its own physicality in favor of another: the sculptural form. What I mean, I guess, is that the video sculpture at once explicates its family resemblance, to use Wittgenstein’s term,[1] to the medium of video, whilst simultaneously articulating its distance from the latter, like a grandson or granddaughter narrating the story of his or her grandparents through a contemporary idiom, through ahistorical and nonspatial, that is to say, decontextualised tropes, references and experiential registers.
- Video sculpture extends the space of video through sculpture, whilst expanding the sculptural realm by means of video.
As amongst others Panofsky has noted, we tend, or at any case have tended since the Renaissance, to experience the screen, canvas, video screen or interface, as at once continuous and discontinuous.[2] It is continuous in that the screen presupposes, or indeed, calling to mind the discussion above, performs, a space that optically runs from the image behind the textile, or glass, or plastic, all the way to the viewer in front of it: what is called perspective. Here the video screen opens up a visual thoroughfare between the there of the fictional world and the here of the audience. Yet the space of the video screen is also discontinuous, since if the textile, glass or plastic provides a visual passage between two places, it also obstructs other paths, such as those of touch, movement, and, of course, matter. Artists have problematized this schizophrenia in numerous ways, ranging from the modernist flattening of the behind, pulling the fictional world towards the textile, drawing attention to the surface; to, alternatively, the cracking the glass, allowing matter to move along the axis – as in Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo, where Jeff Daniels crosses from the filmic world into the cinema, traversing from the canvas into the theatre, turning a two-dimensional illusion into a three-dimensional reality; but if anything, these examples demonstrate how much we have come to be accustomed to, how much we take for granted, the screen’s split nature.
The practice of video sculpture extends the schizophrenic space of the video screen through sculptural form. On the one hand, video sculpture is able to draw out the space behind the textile, extracting in whatever ways the aesthetics, epistemological conventions and ontological rules into the material world, compelling the audience to contemplate their virtual experience in actuality. On the other hand, you might say that the video sculpture can also pull together, permeate, or rather, perhaps, thicken, the space in front of the glass: it intervenes in the interaction, by forcing the audience into particular positions, by encouraging to experience the visual as matter, by inviting us to ponder relations with other objects, etc… Here the actual space is pressed, as it were, into distinct virtual affects, allowing us to intuit the extent to which actual experience is always already perfused with virtualities. The effect of these two simultaneous movements, of extraction and contraction, is that the experience is distributed evenly across the various media, or rather indeed, as Belting might say, between them,[3] an experience of movement that is simultaneously instilled, as if each frame, each cel, was drawn out, drawn around you, infinitely, a thin foil celluloid that thickens, that gets stuck around your arm, that entraps your feet, where, like in that Ballard novel, the inverse of Marx’s dictum, all that is air crystallizes into solids.
Obviously, this is only one part of the equation, since it may well be that a video sculpture expands sculptural form to rather different effects. My point here is not that video sculpture necessarily re-appropriates its media in one way or another, or that it understands space exclusively as such or such; on the contrary. What I wish to suggest here, merely, is that in thinking about video sculpture, we need to think through the possible ontological implications, in the same way artists, curators, critics and scholars have for other practices. Video sculpture is not simply the sum of all parts; it is another computation altogether.
- Video sculpture creates a space that is neither that of the video nor sculptural, yet that nonetheless cannot be understood without reference to either of them.
In the video sculpture the video and sculpture are put into touch with one another so as to open up a dialogue in which a discourse comes into existence that could not have been thought up by either of them individually (and do not have to have anything to do with them), yet obviously could not have presented itself without them either, much in the same way a discussion at a seminar or with friends brings to the table offerings you could have never mustered up on your own. At times, this exchange provokes radical ideas, at other times it prompts revelations that quickly fade; often, unfortunately, it produces nothing much at all, just as many of my talks with colleagues and friends contribute little beyond our own entertainment, or worse, ego. What I guess I want to say, here, is that the practice of video sculpture creates a space within which opportunities may arise that could not arise elsewhere – but that not every one of these spaces allows for the fulfillment of these chances.
[1] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009
[2] Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form. New York: Zone Books,
1991. See also: William Dunning, Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial
Illusion in Painting. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992
[3] Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images. Picture, Medium, Body, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011 (in particular pp. 1-61).
This text is commisisioned as part of a collaborative research project on video sculpture by Natalie Sanders and Rebecca Glover. The project included; a reading group, with Dunya Kalantary, Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau and Ami Clarke; a practice-led symposium chaired by Dave Charlesworth, with Verity Birt, Niamh Riordan, Daniel Shanken, Alice Khalilova, Marcus Orlandi and Megan Broadmeadow; an artist talk by Lindsey Seers; and an exhibition by Natalie Sanders and Rebecca Glover over the weekend of 14-17th May 2015 hosted by Guest Projects, London. The research project is documented in a blog, which includes a full recording of the symposium.
