This has been a mixed week. I had a real battle with my laptop and new software I got for it so that I could capture individual frames from the cine film dvd, and then build those into a new ‘moving picture’. Like all tech battles, this has taken time to overcome, but I’ve slowly learned how to use the new software. Hopefully I shall have a more exciting video to show for it soon. There are more interesting lost frames further into the dvd, but as I’m collecting them chronologically, they don’t feature yet! So far I’ve just made a very short slideshow.
During my tech battle I’ve been reflecting on Cornelia Parker again, and fretting about how to treat the ‘lost’ cine frames. My little YouTube slide show seems much less interesting than some of the tracing paper paintings I’ve made.
In the essay I wrote about her work I focused on how Parker uses indexical traces of action to bring process to the fore. It is easy to see photographs as indices of the action they record. A sign becomes an index when “There is a direct link between the sign and the object…smoke is an index of fire…Traffic signs in the street are index signs: they have a direct link to the physical reality of where they are placed…” (Crow, D. (2003) Visible Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics in the Visual Arts. 2nd Edn. Lausanne: AVA Publishing SA.pp.13-31). An index “retains at least something of the existential ‘having been thereness’ of that which is signified” (Gibbons, J. (2007) Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance. London: I. B. Tauris, p.30).
I’ve mentioned in an earlier post that my cine film project made me think about her Pornographic Drawings, 1996, because Parker also dealt with film and the actions and narratives it recorded. Parker is also interesting to me because her work acknowledges a problem with photographs as indices of action or process that is at the heart of my fascination with these old cine films and their individual frames. Gibbons (pp.34-7) drew attention to this issue, stating “Photographs are ‘degenerate’ signs, an idea expanded by Victor Burgin, who explained, the ‘viewer comes to the photograph with pre-textual knowledge… the naturalness of the photograph is a deceit'”. This is precisely what I am trying to get at with my treatment of these cine frames. People are in the habit of treating photographs as excellent evidence – think how society has come to rely on cctv, for example. We imagine each photographic frame records its own truth, but in fact everyone who sees a photographic print imposes their own interpretation on its image.
In my research for the essay I noticed that Parker used photographs differently during the course of her work from 1988, when she made Thirty Pieces of Silver, 1988-9, to 1996, when she made Pornographic Drawings, 1996. In her 1988 work, photographs were initially exhibited as part of her original Ikon Gallery installation, but later omitted. By Pornographic Drawings the only photographs, video images, associated with the work’s process were destroyed.
It seemed to me that Parker recognised photographs might constrict the openness of her intended narrative. Her photographs for the 1988 work dealt overtly with ‘before’ and ‘after’ Parker’s steamrollering of the ‘pieces of silver’, and might have suggested too much of Parker’s intention in work that she realised had more power without it. When she made Pornographic Drawings, Parker created a compelling demonstration of real photographic degeneration. Her piece reduced the actual space between processes to a physical minimum of mere indexical traces of those processes – the allegedly pornographic acts, physical filming, institutional judgements and decisions, chemical melting etc. all reduced to a solvent that Parker simply prints. By reducing the photographs to mere ‘traces’, Parker’s argument about purity vs. pornography comes to life.
I can’t destroy my family’s collection of well-worn cine films. But I can investigate the images that record already lost actions. I will persist with my lost images video and see how it looks as I add in more frames. Maybe re-filming them in this way will develop into something interesting in itself.
