Long Film for Four Projectors, Anthony McCall, photo by Henry Graber, courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery

Angela Kingston (with a lot of help from Jennet Thomas and Paul Tarragó) runs through the bad and the good.

Brickbats

The video’s not working.

It’s not working and you’ve told the invigilator, and they say they can’t do anything about it and can you come back and you can’t because you live miles away and you came specially to see it.

The video’s been chosen to boost the number of ‘names’ (especially international ones) at low cost, and it’s using up very little space on a tiny monitor on a stupid little plinth, with a single pair of dangling headphones.

The video’s been projected very, very large to use up a lot of space, because otherwise there wouldn’t be enough work.

It’s sited where if you watch it you’re ‘in the way’ of a flow of people.

There’s nowhere to sit.

You can’t hear it because it’s somewhere noisy — next to another video, or in a corridor, or by the gallery café.

You can’t hear it because it’s been turned down because it’s driving the invigilators crazy.

You can’t hear it because there’s an incredible echo, because (i) the floor is stone or concrete (ii) the walls are stone or concrete (iii) there’s nothing like a carpet, or fabric on the walls, to dampen everything (iv) the speakers are on the floor.

You can’t hear it because there are other films/videos right next to it and everything is bleeding like mad.

At intervals, the invigilator’s radio goes off.

At intervals, the invigilator’s radio goes off and they answer it. (Hayward, you are the worst offender.)

You’ve been on your own looking at something for ages, and at intervals an invigilator comes in to check you’re not doing something weird in there.

It’s a cinema piece and it’s on a monitor.

It’s on a monitor, and it’s opposite a window, and all you can see are reflections.

It’s a projection and the blackout’s rubbish.

It’s a projection and there’s a door that opens all the time and lets in light.

The curator’s totally over-designed it and the videos/films are part of a strange, plastic-looking, revolving display.

It’s an hour-long piece but you’ve got no way of telling this.

It’s an hour-long piece but you don’t know what point it’s at.

It’s an hour-long piece and you arrive halfway through and there’s no one else around but there’s no button to press to start it at the beginning, because of the whole aura of the artwork thing.

It’s an hour-long piece and it suddenly stops after 45 minutes because the gallery is closing.

Bouquets

We’ve never seen a film or video displayed badly at the Serpentine. Anthony McCall’s show was a triumph of technicianing and curating.

We’ve never seen a Bill Viola video badly displayed. His people send out exacting instructions and make sure they’re followed.

We really approve of countdowns. Jordan Baseman, we take our hats off to you.

And a proposal

An annual prize for the best gallery for film and video.

An annual booby prize for the worst.

About the Author: Angela Kingston is a curator and writer.

Anisa Mayet by Charlotte Ginsborg

The meaning, value and purpose of art cannot consciously be determined: these come as after-effects, and can only be understood once the artwork has been made. We learn all this as a habit of mind at art school, and it’s one aspect of our understanding of the term ‘independent’, as applied to artist-filmmakers. True artists’ films are self-initiated, and free from external demands and expectations, and the artists are answerable only to their individual, creative processes.

I was conscious of this whole etiquette when I co-commissioned Alnoor Dewshi to make a film for a hospital in Birmingham. We asked him to make a piece that would support teenagers undergoing treatment for cancer. His response was Mknki (1999), a surprisingly funny film with monkey characters, and an allegory for the various ways a life-threatening illness might be faced. But in any other context, I don’t think anyone would be conscious that it was made for a purpose. It’s just a great little film.

Cornelia Parker, on the other hand, when asked to contribute to a biennial about ‘art, ecology and the politics of change’, was so struck by the importance of the subject that she ‘decided to take the theme head on, and attempt to make a polemical piece’ (Guardian, 12 February 2008). In the resulting film, Chomskian Abstract (2007), Noam Chomsky answers her questions about the world powers’ slow response and the Bush government’s denial. In a debate at the RSA, Cornelia Parker explained that she’s prepared to risk the accusation that she’s made a piece of propaganda.

When disabled children reach adulthood, they undergo a formal ‘Assessment of Need’. One of the functions of the assessment is to give information to the people who will be involved in their future care. Kate Adams, an artist and the director of Project Art Works, found the assessment of her son extremely limited: ‘There was very little information about who he is and how he engages with, and perceives, the world. Many of these facets of his personality and individuality are enigmatic and subtle but a good understanding of them is vital to his well being.’

As a response to this, Kate Adams commissioned artist-filmmakers to make portraits of twelve young adults with disabilities, to flesh out their bare-bones formal assessments: six artists took part, including Charlotte Ginsborg and Ben Rivers. Given the responsibilities of the task and the direct sense of purpose, how did the artists feel about the whole process?

Ben Rivers, who made a film about Jack Stephenson: ‘It was a really great video to make. I’ve spoken with Charlotte a few times about how it was quite a different experience for us both, from our ‘normal’ practice. I think in many ways I would rather have made a film with less narration because Jack doesn’t communicate in words, but I was always aware that I needed to convey some important information, because of the purpose of the video. It was also a strange and new experience to film a person who wasn’t able to communicate directly and that it was OK for me to film him. On the whole though, it was a really enjoyable experience, mainly because Jack is a very nice person to be around.’

Charlotte Ginsborg, who made films about Anisa Mayet and Husne Tekagac: ‘It necessitated a very different approach to the filming process than when making my own films. Although I do employ documentary techniques in my ‘art’ films, and the people who appear in my films are ‘real’, I have always incorporated an element of fiction or overtly staged performance. With the Project Art Works films I felt that it would have been entirely inappropriate to add any fictional elements to the works. Both Anisa and Husne presented extremely challenging behaviour and I wanted to portray the sophisticated understanding of emotion and behaviour (both from the girls and from their carers) that I discovered in their homes and at their school.’

As a further comment, Charlotte Ginsborg says: the Project Art Works films enabled me to feel less constrained in my making process. I felt relieved of the pressure to make an ‘artwork’ and the pretension that comes with this.’ Going back to the first points I made in this article, I’ve felt a sense of relief, too, in the course of describing each of the works that I’ve mentioned, that the individualism of art practice can be dropped. It can seem an over-rated quality, in this era of the individualist and the artist-as-celebrity.

About the Author: Angela Kingston is a curator and writer. A book about the Personal Profile Project, called Art in Transition, is available as a pdf download from Project Art Works.

Husne Tekagac by Charlotte Ginsborg and Jack Stephenson by Ben Rivers is available to watch on APEngine showcase, The Personal Profile Project: Ben Rivers and Charlotte Ginsborg. There is also an interview with Ben Rivers available here.

The Last 3600 Seconds of Wasp, Zatorski & Zatorski, image courtesy of the artists

Angela Kingston considers God and the importance of seeing small things.

I’m now an atheist, but I’m nostalgic about one thing in particular from my Sunday School. On the wall, mounted in a frame, were the words: God sees the sparrow fall. Meaning that, no matter how insignificant something might seem to be, there’s an all-seeing, all-caring witness of it. (The phrase is from Matthew in the Bible; the idea of omniscience also features large in other religions.)

When I went to the preview of the Whitechapel Gallery Open in 2001, there were hordes of people watching a video called The Last 3600 Seconds of Wasp, by Zatorski and Zatorski.  It was of a wasp, in close-up, in its dying throes – and it was 60 minutes long. But people could not tear themselves away. Everyone was transfixed as the wasp twitched its legs in the air and then became quite motionless, over and over again, until finally it moved no more.

My point is that in our hard-bitten secular society we at some level still crave a sense of the existence of a witness to the smallest of events; we also want to think that everything matters. And I’m proposing that there’s a ‘witness’ type of filmmaking that can serve, in part at least, as a substitute for the idea of God. In the case of The Last 3600 Seconds of Wasp, while we’re watching the ‘witnessing of the camera’, we’re temporarily relieved of the limitations of what we as humans will ordinarily notice and care about.

Think of all the single-screen artists’ films that are comprised of one, or just a very few shots, in which very little happens, except that something that’s at first glance insignificant becomes meaningful – eventually. For example, there’s Cobra Mist (2008) by Emily Richardson, involving long, slow footage of a decaying ex-military base that: ‘records the physical traces of its often secretive past using the photographic nature of 16mm film and time lapse to construct an impossible experience of the landscape and expose its history to the camera’. Or Mark Wallinger’s Threshold to the Kingdom (2000), in which a static camera is trained on a steady flow of people coming through the arrivals door of an airport. Or Rosalind Nashashibi’s Hreash House (2004), a film of the domestic interior of a Palestinian home, during the preparation and eating of a meal.

In such films, time is captured and stored, and sometimes slowed down or speeded up: thanks to the supra-human capabilities of the camera, the unexpected happens. The otherwise meaningless death of a wasp is invested with the purpose of making us care (Zatorski and Zatorski); some tumble-down buildings cause us to reflect with concern about chilling aspects of human behaviour (Richardson); we find ourselves ruminating on hope and innocence, and on our fears, compassionate and guilty by turns (Wallinger); we have a privileged view of distant strangers, and we learn something essential about them by watching every detail of their lives (Nashashibi). The camera’s singular eye invests us with a conscience, and the world with meaning.

Nasty Piece of Stuff, images courtesy of Jordan Baseman

We’ve traditionally thought of animation in terms of drawings or models that, frame-by-frame, have been made to seem to move. However, animation now includes ‘normal’, real-time films that have been intensively worked with rapid edits and cuts, repeats and reversals, speedings-up and slowings-down, collage effects and digital manipulations. And also instances in which the frames of a real action shot are taken one by one, the animation happening effectively within the camera.

Essentially, animation is film that has been used or taken in a ‘wrong way’. And it seems natural and interesting to ask: what might trigger a filmmaker to want to muck about with film? And in what ways has this ‘wrongness’ of animation become meaningful to artists, and to viewers?

An Animate Projects conference at Tate Modern earlier this year was called Animation Breakdown.  Artists and others duly gave a breakdown of various kinds of approaches. But the tongue-in-cheek implication of the title wasn’t given an airing: animation as breakdown. Animation as a type of failure, or as a manifestation of the mind giving way, even.

I was reminded of this second idea of psychological breakdown when I watched one of Jordan Baseman’s recent films. He is now well known for his films in which people he’s contacted, usually via advertisements, talk to camera. More recently, he’s often used other footage that he’s filmed or found to accompany the voice of his subject. Nasty Piece of Stuff is the first of his films to use animation techniques extensively, in order to create some extraordinary visuals for a film about a man he met in Soho.

Here’s Jordan Baseman’s description of how he made the film: “Nasty Piece of Stuff is a stop frame animation shot on 16mm film but edited digitally, frame by frame. The animations in the street were interesting – some shots were done walking around and moving the camera every which way and some were from a moving car. The digital construction of the work took a considerable amount of time; nearly three months. It isn’t speeded up – I used just in-camera techniques.”

In Nasty Piece of Stuff, the man talks about how, years ago, he was raped – and how this gave rise to a whole series of other violations. There are undertones of disgust and incredulity, but he speaks throughout in a shockingly moderate way, his voice cracking only slightly here and there. The animated visuals, on the other hand, perform a violently agitated, staccato dance, as if in answer to him. Each time he speaks, there’s a burst of images of a streetscape at night, or of the trails of city lights; each time he’s silent, the screen is blank.

There’s a syndrome known to psychoanalysts in which, in extreme cases, the analysand cannot feel their own distress – and the analyst can find him or herself pitched into the unexpressed emotions, which they feel on behalf of their patient. In this vein, it’s as if the film footage that Jordan Baseman has animated undergoes, each time the film is screened, a kind of breakdown, on behalf of the man who cannot allow himself to fall apart. The fractured and ‘wrong’ visuals of the animated film manifest the violations and disturbances of the mind.

About the Author: Angela Kingston is a curator and writer.

Jordan Baseman‘s Nasty Piece of Stuff has been shown at ArtSway, Lymington, Photographers’ Gallery, London, and the New Forest Pavilion, Venice, all during 2009.