Morna Hinton
Hal Foster, An Archival Impulse, 2004
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In An Archival Impulse Hal Foster assesses the ways in which archives drive the practices of contemporary artists, such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Sam Durant and Tacita Dean. In the first instance, archival artists seek to make sometimes obscure or overlooked sources physically present. They inventory, sample and share as ways of working. He sees archival art as ‘distinct from art focussed on the museum, which tends to critique the institutional integrity of museum displays and collections’. However, his view that these artists are ‘rarely cynical in intent’ overlooks the fact that archives, like museum collections are partial and biased in their organisation and collecting policies. They are therefore are not quite as pristine and democratic as he imagines, although their relatively unmediated nature (compared to museums) supports Foster’s assertion that archives are essentially creative. They ‘turn belatedness into becomingness’ touches on the relatively unmediated nature of archives, especially in the digital aid where a google search throws up all sorts of material from private and public sources, many of which would not describe themselves as archives. In the end he sees archival art as a desire to ‘connect what cannot be connected… a will to relate – to probe a misplaced past, to collate its different signs… to ascertain what might remain for the present’. In the end the archival impulse emerges from ‘a failure in cultural memory… why else connect so feverishly if things did not appear so frightfully disconnected in the first place?’
Thomas Hirschhorn, Otto Frendlich Altar, 1998
Matt Saunders, Poems of Our
Climate, installation shots, 2018
Matt Saunders, Poems of Our Climate, Marian Goodman Gallery, 11 Jan – 17 Feb 2018
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In Poems of Our Climate Saunders showcases his continued interrogation of painting in relation to film, photography and print. He introduces a further poetic dimension by naming the exhibition after a poem by Wallace Stevens that revolves around the tension between cold perfection (‘clear water in a brilliant bowl’) and the ‘paradise’ of the imperfect. In fact, if you view the exhibition with this dichotomy in mind, it makes a lot of sense. The ‘imperfections’ of painting – drips, brush marks and so on – are married with the ‘perfection’ of the digital, which is then deliberately messed up, badly registered or pixellated. The five huge etchings in the Ratios/Indomitable series, based on overlaid 1960’s film stills of the glamorous Hannelore Hoger, are shown together with prints taken from the scratched and scuffed reverse sides of the giant plates. In his delicately coloured paintings on chiffon that might otherwise be rather saccharine, Saunders revels in drips and apparently random surface textures that look like the traces of another painting laid accidentally on top of it. Glossy photographic prints are made by passing light through painted canvas.
The heart of the exhibition is the five-screen animation Townhouse (The Intricate Alps) where all sorts of painterly and digital effects, often out of focus and blurred, pulse through the air. The film is very much about an interior, the townhouse of the title, with a couple in bed emerging from the abstraction every now and then. The digitally projected Townhouse is anchored by chiffon, linen or plastic stretched canvasses that hold, imperfectly, the pure glowing images.
Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977
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On Photography is a collection of essays originally published in the New York Review of Books. According to Sontag, photographs allow us to possess the world, and this ordering of experience gives us the illusion of control over it, not least because photographers never simply record some kind of objective ‘truth’ – there is always interpretation in how the camera’s lens is pointed and focussed. Sontag talks about the different ways in which we view photographs and film. Chris Marker’s films that use montages of still photographs are of particular interest to her and she reflects at some length on his film Si J’avais Quatres Dromadaires (If I Had Four Camels), speculating on the inherent nostalgia of photographs. She feels that they are always more memorable than moving images because they are a slice of time and space – ‘the knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist’.
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Sontag adopts a moral position in respect of photographs. This is partly because photographing something means you can't intervene in it (or at least not at the moment you take the picture). This rather disregards the important role that war photography plays in alerting people to horrific events, although she is correct to say that we become numb due to over-exposure. Sontag was remarkably prescient in her description of the way camera phones have turned us all into ‘image junkies’ who increasingly do things for the sole purpose of photographing them – ‘today everything exists to end in a photograph’.
Ilona Sagar, Correspondence O, installation shots, 2017
Ilona Sagar, Correspondence O, December 2017 – February 2018
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In Correspondence O, her solo show at the South London Gallery, Ilona Sagar presents a major film project and installation of archive material exploring the history of the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, a radical 24-year experiment in public health and fitness. Sagar returns again and again to shots of the now-private Pioneer Centre’s swimming pool in her film, including computer-generated scans of the type used by building surveyors (she met a surveyor by chance while working on the project). These LiDAR scans sit alongside digital mapping of the body of her two actors – a woman and a boy – and film of an MRI scan in progress.
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Sagar writes as part of her practice, and some of this writing, which incorporates found text such as the instructions for the MRI scan, forms the soundtrack to the film, creating a mood that is detached and analytic. Her actors move slowly across the angled split screen presentation, showing no emotion in the various situations in which she has placed them. Sometimes the same image is on both screens, while elsewhere she contrasts contemporary and archival, wide shots and close ups. There is a monochrome tonality even to the contemporary colour footage, which helps the black and white photographs and scans fit in to the whole without jarring.
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The project has clearly been informed by extensive research, including in the holdings of the Wellcome Collection. Film, pamphlets and photographs are presented in a second room. Although interesting they seem rather dead compared to the film, which adds a poetic and elegiac dimension.
Elizabeth Price, The Woolworths Choir of 1979, 2012, Tate Britain, March 2018
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In the Turner –Prize-winning Woolworths Choir handclaps and finger clicks combine with sung vocals to knit the work together across its three distinct sections of church architecture, 1960's pop videos and archive news footage of the eponymous fatal fire in a Manchester branch of Woolworths in 1979. Price’s montage editing blends the didactic powerpoint-style labelling of the parts of the church, the glamour of the pop videos and the human interest drama of the news footage. She frequently doubles up images, which is a clever way of dealing with the different screen ratio of archive film, and makes one image black and white while the other is colour, although the overall tone of the film is dark throughout. It was while editing these disparate elements that Price noticed a common hand gesture – a twisting wrist – that occurred across all three groups of material. It is there in the Medieval sepulchres, the Shangri La’s, and most poignantly, as a movement of despair in hands extended from the upper windows of Woolworths while the fire raged, and the incomprehending gestures of the survivors.
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Price’s interest in language is evident in the explanatory sub-titles about the Greek roots of the words choir, chorus and quire. There is also an interesting rhyme in the title where she substitutes ‘Choir’ for ‘Fire’. The exclusively female singers of her ‘choir’ stand as a Greek chorus of mourners for the fire’s victims. Computer-generated graphics explore the Gothic choir stalls and then, chillingly, the same graphics draw out the site of the fire in Woolworths’ Furniture Department.
Elizabeth Price, The Woolworths Choir of 1979, stills & installation shots, 2012 (2018 installation)
Andrew Kötting with Iain Sinclair, Swandown, 2013
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Swandown is a feature-length film recording the journey by swan-shaped pedalo of Andrew Kötting and Ian Sinclair from Hastings to Hackney in 2012, the year of the London Olympics. It starts with them attempting to launch the pedalo on Hastings beach, which seemed to necessitate the consumption of lots of wine, prompting the first of many ‘libations’ as they christen their vessel Edith after the (long-necked) Modernist poet Edith Sitwell.
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The film itself is often very beautifully shot – despite the constant absurdity of the pedalo – and makes good use of speeded up footage and time lapse photography to give the sense of the length of the journey. However, its genesis in Sinclair’s hatred for the Olympics isn’t really followed through except in the destination of the voyage in his London home of Hackney (where Sinclair feels nothing should have been agreed without his consent) and some comments about pedalo racing as a potential Olympic sport and its concomitant benefits for world peace. The sound design by Philippe Ciompi skilfully mixes the psychogeographic banter between Kötting, Sinclair and their guests with archival clips about the rivers and canals they travel along, as well as the ambient sound of water and wildfowl. The film epitomises a type of ‘muscular’, male-dominated psychogeography which can feel a bit exclusive; of all the guests hosted on the pedalo, only one is a woman. There’s a whiff of bromance between Kötting and Sinclair too, with Kötting left mourning his pal’s departure for Boston as he trugs up the River Lea alone at the end.
Andrew Kötting, stills from Swandown, 2013
Tacita Dean, pages from Teignmouth Electron, 1999
Tacita Dean, Teignmouth Electron, 1999
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The book Teignmouth Electron is the culmination of Dean’s fascination with the story of Donald Crowhurst, the British sailor who entered a competition to be the first to circumnavigate solo non-stop around the world in 1968. Poorly prepared, Crowhurst soon realised that his boat the Teignmouth Electron would not withstand the voyage so turned off his radio and hid out in the mid-Atlantic constructing a fake course in his log book (but at the same time writing a true log book). He picked up the race in its final leg back to Britain but committed suicide by jumping overboard, unable to live with his deceit, his mind disordered by the ‘time madness’ that can affect sailors reliant on chronometers to know their location.
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In her book Dean describes what happened to the boat subsequently, and her discovery of it stranded on a Caribbean island. Her photographs of the damaged and deteriorating vessel show it looking incongruous amongst the tropical vegetation, but at the same time the stormy skies and wind-blown palms add to the sense of desolation. Associated films, Disappearance at Sea I and II (1996 and 1997) take a more oblique approach, focussing on a lighthouse. The book, which relates more directly to her third film Teignmouth Electron (1999), is artwork as research and archive. Her view is that it Crowhurst’s story is essentially about truth, about ‘hubris and bravado’. Dean inter-weaves the facts with accounts of her dreams as well as literature, history, art, film and official documents. She makes reference to Crowhurst’s log books, but frustratingly doesn’t show any images of them, except in the epigraph to the book, which is a reproduction of his final written words ‘IT IS THE MERCY’.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 1980
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In Camera Lucida Barthes presents a meditation on photography in which he tries to decide what its essence or ‘noeme’ is. His focus is on still photographs rather than film, partly because by film he understands only feature films, which are fictions, and in which the gaze of the actors is rarely – he claims never – directed to the viewer, but to the other actors. The photographs that he finds most relevant in terms of demonstrating the ‘eidos’ or essential nature of photography are those in which there is some detail that catches at the attention, and more specifically at the feelings. This detail he calls the ‘punctum’ which he sets in opposition to the ‘studium’, which is made up of the overall image and its typical interpretation by the viewer. He writes that the punctum ‘is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’. The poignancy of certain photographs is epitomised by an image of his mother as a girl, which for Barthes encapsulates her essence – ‘there she is!’ – as he is leafing through old photos shortly after she has died. In fact, it is death that turns out to be the essence of photography for Barthes. Photography is always ‘that-has-been’ because you can never escape the fact that the image in your hand was made as a result of light falling on a real person or object in the past. It is perhaps particularly poignant that Barthes died the same year that Camera Lucida was published.
