Life and Death

I visited the William Kentridge Exhibition Thick Time at the Whitechapel Gallery. I was interested in the process of animation, how individual images are linked together to make what appear to be moving images.

This is an animation where a drawing of Kentridge appears to be drawing a picture of himself but then defaces and destroys it. The Kentridge that is drawing appears to slowly emerge from the paper as the ‘real’ Kentridge and starts to reassemble the torn drawing back to its original state.

Kentridge plays with the audience’s expectation as he transforms the images from animation to the real thing. It is disorientating in that it blurs the boundaries between what is real and what is animated so that the viewer questions what they are looking at.

Mona Hatoum talked about wanting “to create a situation where reality itself becomes a questionable point” (p.24, 2001) and what we see not being what it promises to be and how she wanted to create work which makes the viewer “question the solidity of the ground you walk on” (p.24, 2001).

How do we know what is real and what is not? How do we know that what we create is real or not real?
It made me think about the question of the creator also as the destroyer, the constant cycle of creation and destruction.

This exhibition inspired me to take some inanimate shapes made from paper and see if I could bring them to life. I took several stills and then edited them together to make a moving animation. It was interesting playing around with the amount of time needed to focus on each still to create the illusion of movement, too long and the images didn’t come to life.

It was as if the correct amount of time had the ability to give the inanimate object its own life.

I made three short videos which can be viewed at Vimeo.com:

Rolling Eyes https://vimeo.com/207165916
Gingerbread Man https://vimeo.com/207165833
Drawing https://vimeo.com/207165734

Reflecting on the videos I had made, I thought about how movement could bring inanimate objects to life but it didn’t necessarily mean that something was alive. It also made me think about Freud and his description of the uncanny which can arise from the contrasting readings of the animate and the inanimate and Masahiro Mori’s concept of the Uncanny Valley.

I found creating animations raised more questions about what makes something real. We tend to say something is alive if it has an awareness of itself or is conscious but how can this be measured? If we don’t truly understand what consciousness is, how can we be sure when and where it exists?

The installation How it is (2009) in the Turbine Hall, Tate by Miroslaw Balka’s is an example of how a viewer’s experience of an installation can be influenced by other viewers.

The installation consists of a huge pitch black container to which viewers are invited inside. Similar to Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ but in three dimensions. Unfortunately the blackness inside the container can be interrupted by light from people using their mobile phones.

This made me think about how other viewers can influence and dictate the time a viewer has to experience an installation or piece of work and what role the curator plays in this.

I started to appreciate the importance of curatorial decisions and see how an exhibition curated well can elevate or devalue the success of the work.

La Soglia Magical is a light and steam installation in airport Malpensa in Milan. All passengers have to go through the installation to exit the airport.

What does it mean when people have no choice about engaging with an installation? Or what about when they have to make a choice themselves? Is it possible not to engage with an installation?

I found this an interesting concept and one that was incorporated into a Carsten Höller exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.

To enter the gallery, the viewer is presented with a choice between going through tunnel A or tunnel B. Although the viewer seemingly has a choice about how they enter the exhibition, the choice of how is removed.

We completed a mini module looking at curatorial principles. First we explored examples of successful and unsuccessful curation.
Josephine Pryde, Turner Prize nominee originally used a circular track for her train which people could actually physically interact with by sitting on it but with her Turner prize installation, she opted for a stationery train on a straight track. This changed the work significantly in that the connection and interaction with the audience was lost.

This led me to question was this a deliberate decision by the artist or not and what does it mean when work is changed? Is it just a different version of the same thing? How does the meaning of the work change?

It could be argued that the artist has used one of Viktor Schlovsky’s identified devices of defamiliarisation by removing the train of its primary function. By rendering it stationery it forces the viewer to re-evaluate the object in a different context, opening up the possibility of relating to it in a new way.

An example of a curatorial success was the Louise Bourgeois’ exhibition at Tate Modern. A selection of work was displayed in a large open room. How the work had been placed had been very well thought out, allowing movement and interaction between the pieces.

Viewers could explore the work from all angles. Some of the work was suspended from the ceiling allowing it to make shapes and visual patterns that seemed to create a cosmos, further accentuating the space.