Fig. 1. Bill Viola - Memoria, 2000
A face is to a body as a fingerprint is to a finger.
Addendum: Click me! Click me!
Showing posts with label Bill Viola. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bill Viola. Show all posts
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Unpublished Reflections Of A 584-Year-Old Camera
Fig. 1. Laurie Simmons - Big Camera, Small Camera, 1977
'One day in 1425, Filippo Brunelleschi walked out onto the Piazza del Duomo in Florence. Standing at the main doors to the cathedral, facing the baptistery across the piazza, he set up a small wooden box on a stand. He had invited various influential friends and cognoscenti to witness his experiment. One by one they stepped up to this curious device and closed one eye to stare through a small hole in one side. To a twentieth-century observer, the only interpretation of this scene could be that of a photographer demonstrating a new camera. By expanding the definition of photography perhaps more than is acceptable, Brunelleschi's box could be considered a crude camera. For a citizen of fifteenth-century Florence, the effects of looking into this device were as mind-boggling and astounding as if seeing an actual camera for the first time. Peering into the small hole, they first saw a direct monocular view of the baptistery across the way. Then, by the flip of a lever, a mirror was moved into position and a small painting of the baptistery appeared, exactly in line and proportional to the direct view. In fact, with regard to geometry and form, the two were barely distinguishable. Brunelleschi had made a sharp right-hand turn out of the Middle Ages.
That Brunelleschi's demonstration seems so obvious to us today is a measure of its intellectual achievement - the more a revolutionary discovery shifts or even shatters the world view, the more commonplace it seems to the observers of subsequent ages. What he accomplished that day must have seemed to his contemporaries to be at the very limits of knowledge, as incredible, for example, as some of the quantum physicists' descriptions of our world seem to people of today. Prior to 1424, no one had ever painted an image that way. Historians describe this event as Brunelleschi's public pronouncement of the laws of linear perspective, which he is credited with discovering. There is certainly no doubt that his new system, along with its formalization and publication by his friend Leon Alberti twelve years later, irrevocably altered the history of painting and accelerated the development of techniques of artificial image making.
Describing Brunelleschi's breakthrough simply as the discovery of the vanishing point, however, places an inordinate emphasis on the picture itself as the locale of this revolutionary change. What Brunelleschi achieved was the personification of the image, the creation of a "point of view" and its identification with a place in real space. In doing so, he elevated the position of the individual viewer to an integral part of the picture by encoding this presence as the inverse, in absentia, source of the converging perspectival lines. The picture became an opaque mirror for the viewer, and the viewer, in turn, became the embodiment of the painter, "completing the picture" as art historians like to say, with the two points of view merging in a single physical spot. The painter now says when he or she paints, "See things as I see them. ... Stand in my shoes." Consequently, the picture plane and the retina became the same surface. Of course, "Whose retina?" was the key question, as the manipulation of the viewer, an early form of behaviorism, was added to the list of artistic techniques.
In the dialogue between viewer and image, there were now three entities where formerly there had been two, or possibly even one. (One in the sense that most images, as thoroughly two-dimensional diagrammatic and/or schematic representations, were previously used as a sacred vehicle to achieve a state of union between the viewer and the divinity.) The image was to be taken to heart within the individual, with the concurrent loss of self-identity so common to religious experience, thus forming the single image of "self/deity." It was an evocation rather than a description (the picture evoked the god or goddess within, it did not describe him or her without).
With the new identification of the viewer with the painter, rather than with the sacred object, came the placement of both of them relative to a third entity, the nearby physical object(s) or subject of the painting, and along with this possibly the inauguration of the process of encroachment of the individual ego (i.e., the artist's) onto the image in the visual arts.
In the Brunelleschian world, the mechanism is perception, the image retinal. When the emphasis is on the act of seeing at a physical place, then time enters the picture as well ("if it's here, it's not there - if it's now, it's not then"). Images become "frozen moments." They become artifacts of the past. In securing a place on earth, they have accepted their own mortality.'
That Brunelleschi's demonstration seems so obvious to us today is a measure of its intellectual achievement - the more a revolutionary discovery shifts or even shatters the world view, the more commonplace it seems to the observers of subsequent ages. What he accomplished that day must have seemed to his contemporaries to be at the very limits of knowledge, as incredible, for example, as some of the quantum physicists' descriptions of our world seem to people of today. Prior to 1424, no one had ever painted an image that way. Historians describe this event as Brunelleschi's public pronouncement of the laws of linear perspective, which he is credited with discovering. There is certainly no doubt that his new system, along with its formalization and publication by his friend Leon Alberti twelve years later, irrevocably altered the history of painting and accelerated the development of techniques of artificial image making.
Describing Brunelleschi's breakthrough simply as the discovery of the vanishing point, however, places an inordinate emphasis on the picture itself as the locale of this revolutionary change. What Brunelleschi achieved was the personification of the image, the creation of a "point of view" and its identification with a place in real space. In doing so, he elevated the position of the individual viewer to an integral part of the picture by encoding this presence as the inverse, in absentia, source of the converging perspectival lines. The picture became an opaque mirror for the viewer, and the viewer, in turn, became the embodiment of the painter, "completing the picture" as art historians like to say, with the two points of view merging in a single physical spot. The painter now says when he or she paints, "See things as I see them. ... Stand in my shoes." Consequently, the picture plane and the retina became the same surface. Of course, "Whose retina?" was the key question, as the manipulation of the viewer, an early form of behaviorism, was added to the list of artistic techniques.
In the dialogue between viewer and image, there were now three entities where formerly there had been two, or possibly even one. (One in the sense that most images, as thoroughly two-dimensional diagrammatic and/or schematic representations, were previously used as a sacred vehicle to achieve a state of union between the viewer and the divinity.) The image was to be taken to heart within the individual, with the concurrent loss of self-identity so common to religious experience, thus forming the single image of "self/deity." It was an evocation rather than a description (the picture evoked the god or goddess within, it did not describe him or her without).
With the new identification of the viewer with the painter, rather than with the sacred object, came the placement of both of them relative to a third entity, the nearby physical object(s) or subject of the painting, and along with this possibly the inauguration of the process of encroachment of the individual ego (i.e., the artist's) onto the image in the visual arts.
In the Brunelleschian world, the mechanism is perception, the image retinal. When the emphasis is on the act of seeing at a physical place, then time enters the picture as well ("if it's here, it's not there - if it's now, it's not then"). Images become "frozen moments." They become artifacts of the past. In securing a place on earth, they have accepted their own mortality.'
Bill Viola ('The Temporal Image' from Video Black: The Mortality of the Image)
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Eugene and Caspar Jump Through Plato's Window
Fig. 1. Caspar David Friedrich - Sunrise over the Sea, c. 1826
EDMUND: You've just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They're all connected with the sea. Here's one. When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself - actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! ... Then another time, on the American line, when I was lookout on the crow's nest in the dawn watch. A clam sea, that time. Only a lazy groundswell and a slow drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which sleep together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came, the peace, the end of the quest, the last harbour, the joy of belonging to a fulfilment beyond men's lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see - and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason! (He grins wryly.) It was a great mistake, my being born a man. I would have been much more successful as a sea-gull or fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!
Addendum #1:
Addendum #2: Katie (thanks!) and ESVM's poetry corner...
EDMUND: You've just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They're all connected with the sea. Here's one. When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself - actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! ... Then another time, on the American line, when I was lookout on the crow's nest in the dawn watch. A clam sea, that time. Only a lazy groundswell and a slow drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which sleep together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came, the peace, the end of the quest, the last harbour, the joy of belonging to a fulfilment beyond men's lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see - and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason! (He grins wryly.) It was a great mistake, my being born a man. I would have been much more successful as a sea-gull or fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!
From Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill
Fig. 2a. & 2b.
Addendum #1:
Interview with Bill Viola at the Venice Biennale, 2007 (TateShots)
Addendum #2: Katie (thanks!) and ESVM's poetry corner...
Even though I live close to the Pacific ocean, seeing this Friedrich and reading the O'Neill passage (I so need to re-read Long Day's Journey!) make me think of the Atlantic ocean, and how much the sea meant to my Grandfather. I'm sure he had a similar sense of a bigger belonging when out at sea.
I'll lay off the ESVM for a while as I'm sure you're tiring of her, but she had such strong feelings about her beloved Maine coast, and I think she and Edmund would have been a good match:
I'll lay off the ESVM for a while as I'm sure you're tiring of her, but she had such strong feelings about her beloved Maine coast, and I think she and Edmund would have been a good match:
InlandAddendum #3: Anonymous' (thanks!) poetry corner...
People that build their houses inland,
People that buy a plot of ground
Shaped like a house, and build a house there,
Far from the sea-board, far from the sound
Of water sucking the hollow ledges,
Tons of water striking the shore, -
What do they long for, as I long for
One salt smell of the sea once more?
People the waves have not awakened,
Spanking the boats at the harbour's head,
What do they long for, as I long for, -
Starting up in my inland bed,
Beating the narrow walls, and finding
Neither a window nor a door,
Screaming to God for death by drowning, -
One salt taste of the sea once more?
L'Homme et la mer
Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer!
La mer est ton miroir; tu contemples ton âme
Dans le déroument infini de sa lame,
Et ton esprit n'est pas un gouffre moins amer
Tu te plais à plonger au sein de ton image;
Tu l'embrasses des yeux et des bras, et ton coeur
Se distrait quelquefois de sa propre rumeur
Au bruit de cette plainte indomptable et sauvage.
Vous êtes tous les deux ténébreux et discrets:
Homme, nul n'a sondé le fond de tes abimes;
O mer, nul ne connait tes richesses intimes,
Tant vous êtes jaloux de garder vos secrets!
Et cependant voilà des siècles innombrables
Que vous vous combattez sans pitié ni remord,
Tellement vous aimez le carnage et la mort,
O lutteurs éternels, ô frères implacables!
Charles Baudelaire (Les Fleurs du Mal)
Sunday, November 30, 2008
The Sunday Six: Part Two (Relatively Eclectic)
Fig. 1. Ivan Moudov - Fragments, 2003 - 2004
Fig. 2. Raymond Pettibon - No title (I've often lamented), 2004
Fig. 3. Bill Viola - Without A Shore (still), 2007
Fig. 4. Johanna Calle - Tejido Foliar (detail), 2008
Fig. 5. Phillip Adams (choreographer) - Axeman's Lullaby, 2008 (photo by Jeff Busby)
Fig. 6. Peter Fischli & David Weiss - Parts of a Film with Rat and a Bear, 2008.
'Think like a man of action and act like a man of thought.'
Henri Bergson
