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Video as Poetry

2011; Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; Volume: 69; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1227/neu.0b013e31823cf71e

1524-4040

Michael Salcman,

Aesthetic Perception and Analysis

FIGURE 1: Michael Salcman served as chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. As art critic and neuroscientist he writes and lectures on art and the brain; see him on The Knowledge Network of The New York Times. As a poet his work appears widely: Alaska Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, New Letters, Ontario Review, Raritan, and New York Quarterly; collections include The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises, 2007), nominated for The Poet's Prize and a finalist for The Towson University Prize in Literature, and The Enemy of Good Is Better (Orchises, 2011).Like love, visual art comes in through the eyes but gathers power when it affects our other senses; it isn't just a matter of the look of a painting but also its feel—how the cuisine of paint and line, its texture and shapeliness, recreates within us the tactile feeling and muscle memory of its creation. Even the weave of the canvas participates in the visuo-tactile seduction of the viewer. In this way the active surface of a painting or drawing yields a polysensory experience, one that is both qualitatively and quantitatively different from the experience provided the brain by the flat face of a photograph or monitor screen. Personally, I did not appreciate the power of video art until the work of William Kentridge (b. 1955) burst upon the international art scene. For the most part, an artist's video or film is to a Hollywood production as the poem is to the novel: shorter, more lyrical, often bereft of a clear narrative arc, more metaphoric, filled with sound and image; in sum, more like verse and less like prose. Videos often record performance and poems are frequently performed. There are differences too. The video presents a series of images that must be experienced over time; the poem's images are more abstract because constructed of words. And words always provide a soundtrack for a poem but an artist's video or film may be silent. These are generalities and a generality is only as good as its latest example. To understand the significance of Kentridge's contribution to his chosen medium it helps to briefly review the history of video art. Video began as a type of sculpture in the hands of conceptual and performance artists.1 The founder of modern video art was a Korean-American, Naim June Paik (1932-2006), who appropriated broadcast images and used modified television sets in sculptural arrays. The images were usually distorted with magnets attached to the televisions (1963); in later years he used digital means to edit the images and produce a cacophony or symphony of sounds and pictures. The invention of the hand-held video camera in the late 1960s (chiefly, the Sony Portapak, 1965) allowed post-Minimalist sculptors to film performative activities (ie, the body was central) within the studio, whether the repetitive attempt of an oil-stained hand to catch a piece of falling lead (Richard Serra, 1968) or an artist walking around a taped-square on the floor (choreographed by Meredith Monk) or scratching at a violin tuned to the notes D.E.A.D. (both Bruce Nauman, 1968). The body in question was either partially seen (ie, the metonymic hand) or completely without an individualized personality; the boredom of repetition emphasized the anonymity of the “actor” and the mechanical nature of the “action” linked such works to the minimalist and post-minimalist art of the era. Such apparently “boring” films captured the essence of studio practice in the age of conceptual art, a somewhat painful and circumscribed life-style in which many hours were spent waiting for a new idea; they also extended earlier examples of studio documentation by straight photography as carried out by Rodin and Brancusi. Extreme examples of the long art film in which “nothing happens” were created by Warhol when he made an eight-hour movie of the Empire State Building at night (1964) and when he turned his camera on a person sleeping (1963). As portable equipment improved, the scale of the work changed and the contribution of the soundtrack grew. Artists like Bill Viola created large video installations in which several projectors and speakers threw large quantities of sound and image upon multiple surfaces, including film screens, television monitors and walls. The crackling of flames and rushing water, the surfacing of bodies blowing bubbles, alternately created an impression of meditative calm and apocalyptic portent. The humble studio shot had grown into a room-sized spectacular but the images retained a purely visual (ie, nontactile) surface, smooth as glass, one that continued to distance many viewers. The obscure narrative structure and conceptual intent of many pieces did nothing to help audiences connect with the work. Changes in video paralleled developments in the size and complexity of sculptural installations during the 1980s and 1990s; video took on those aspects of installation in which an entire architectural environment could be taken over by projected images. A single image of a body might be broken up over a series of television consoles (Gary Hill) or different points in a single narrative arc presented on multiple large screens with overwhelming soundtracks of flowing water and crackling fire (Bill Viola). It was inevitable that some artists would incorporate the trappings of Hollywood film, special effects, luxurious props (later sold as sculptural souvenirs), and guest stars (Norman Mailer, Richard Serra), in operatic full-length productions involving a hero-quest and uncertain mythology (Matthew Barney), political feminism set to an MTV soundtrack (Pipilotti Rist), or, most recently, commercial critique, sexual indeterminism and Goth party culture explored as a daytime Soap (Ryan Trecartin, b. 1981). Trecartin's films are freely available on the web and frequently updated; therefore, their physical embodiment is as unstable as the stories they tell and the sexual orientation and identity of their characters. These films are more like epic poems (ie, The Iliad) than lyrical verse. Other artists have “sampled” Hollywood productions and used extensive editing to appropriate film clips (ie, the readymade strategy of Duchamp) for their own purposes. The master of this mode is Christian Marclay who has spent thousands of hours “borrowing” from films in order to produce “Telephones” (1995) and the more recent and even more astonishing “The Clock” (2010). In the seven and a half minute long “Telephones,” the bare bones narrative arc of a phone call is broken down into its component parts by splicing together dozens of old-time movie stars who first dial rotary and push-button phones, listen to the phone ring or the line come alive, ask “what's up,” look puzzled or delighted (we are never told why), and then end the call by hanging up politely or by slamming the receiver down in anger. Due to advances in wireless technology, these actions and their accompanying sounds are no longer present in contemporary life. Obsolescence and the passage of time is also a theme of “The Clock,” a 24-h extravaganza, in which each clip sampled from hundreds of movies, shows us the filmed face of a wristwatch, wall clock, digital timer or computer display, perfectly synchronized to the actual time in the theater in which we are sitting. Marclay's “Clock” hypnotizes the viewer and creates a type of helpless narcosis, like the repetitive beat of Hip Hop; both the sound editing of the movie scores and the visual transitions have been expertly handled by this former pioneer of turntable mixology. Though Marclay's work, completely constructed from parts of Hollywood movies, shares their physical perfection or “finish,” no one would confuse his artistic practice with commercial film. The video artist shares the conundrum of the fine-art photographer who must determine his or her relationship to scientific documentation and or fashion photography, ie, how far or close to steer to the commercial uses of new media. The more abstract or poetic an artist's video is, the less problematic its identity as an art “object.” Pushing the sculptural and installation or environmental properties of video is also useful in this regard. It has been much more difficult to locate the nexus between video art and more autographic media such as painting or drawing. Bill Viola has been explicit in his desire to claim the contemplative experience of looking at a painting for his own work. He has hired actors to portray the figures and carry out the implied actions of Renaissance and Baroque paintings, videos in which their body movements and facial gestures have been subjected to extreme slow motion (eg, Quintet of Remembrance, 2000). To my eye and brain these demonstrations have been unconvincing and contain none of the visual delight or sonic magic produced by his mysterious aquatic films of bodies slowly dissolving and reappearing underwater. Shown on flat screen televisions, computer monitors and movie screens, the video productions of artists like Viola remain resolutely, physically flat even when visually enthralling. Prior to the advent of the digital camera and computer manipulation, art slides (ie, Kodachromes) and classic photographic prints, by virtue of their dependency on emulsion and print paper, retained a shallow but perceptible 3-dimensional space that the hand could touch, if only in principle; this advantage was not available to video. And that is precisely where the comparison of video with painting fails, on the grounds of tactility. Paintings and drawings are more than visual objects with depicted spaces, the width or thickness of a brushstroke, the pressure of a pencil, create actual spaces that the eye can see and the brain can intuit by its muscle memory. The difference between depicted and actual space carries over into the various processes artists use in the production of original prints; modern silk screens and lithographs are notably flatter and less visually engaging to my eye than the older methods of intaglio or relief printmaking, including woodcuts, etchings, engravings and aquatints. The eye is as likely to explore the groove made by Rembrandt's etching needle or engraving burin as it is to admire his depiction of pelting rain. And the cuisine of paint brushed on by Velazquez is just as enthralling and seductive as the backside of his nude Venus. From van Gogh to de Kooning to the present day, paint became an almost sculptural presence on the surface of the canvas, as much a tactile stimulus as a visual one. The brain contains polysensory cells in the frontal (area 6) and parietal lobes (area 7b) that respond to both types of stimuli2,3 as well as mirror neurons deep in our frontal lobes that help us imitate and decipher the nonverbal communication of other humans. It is thought that mirror neurons have something to do with our ability to place ourselves in the shoes of the other, ie, a Keatsian empathy that allows us to re-rehearse an observed movement or its trace, like a brushstroke, that we ourselves have not actually made. I term such activity by premotor or prefrontal neurons a re-rehearsal because such cells are typically active before movement occurs, thereby rehearsing an action; in the case of art, the observer never makes a movement but re-rehearses that which the artist has already carried out. In addition to frontal and parietal cortex, subcortical structures like the putamen and superior colliculus are also involved in what has come to be known as multisensory integration.4 Both the glass-fronted monitor and the flat plane of the movie screen must frustrate the observer's natural expectations of art based on our cultural influences and neural wiring. In the 1990s, at this juncture in the development of video art, William Kentridge entered the discussion. Paintings and drawings are more than visual objects with depicted spaces, the width or thickness of a brushstroke, the pressure of a pencil, create actual spaces that the eye can see and the brain can intuit by its muscle memory. In 1997, in a darkened room at the XIIth edition of Documenta, the important international art exhibition held every 5 years in the small city of Kassel, Germany, a laser disc repetitively played a short video by an unknown artist from South Africa. The crowd was standing 3 deep against the walls (I know, I was there) completely mesmerized by the magical transformation of the images and the power of the soundtrack. Only later did some of us appreciate the political subtext of the work and the conceptual underpinnings of its methods. William Kentridge from Johannesburg, having worked in virtual anonymity for ten years, had “suddenly” burst upon the world art scene in his forties; he has remained central to it ever since and now occupies a position in video art roughly similar to that of Gerhard Richter in painting.5 How did this happen? Kentridge was born into a politically engagé family; his parents were important lawyers and legislators involved in the fight against apartheid. It was only natural that he would obtain a degree in Politics and African Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. Artistically he served a long apprenticeship in many different media beginning with a Diploma in Fine Arts from the Johannesburg Art Foundation and, of greatest importance, the study of mime and theater at the L’École Jacques Lecoq in Paris. Here he learned he was not much of an actor and would do better concentrating on other theater arts. Between 1975 and 1991 he worked as a theater director and served as a set designer for television films and serials. At the same time Kentridge discovered he had a talent for drawing; his first important works were monotypes (ie, prints made in editions of one or two) in 1979 and a series of etchings called “Domestic Scenes” (1980); the latter bear favorable comparison with the classic satirical engravings of William Hogarth. Soon thereafter, Kentridge began to employ his talent for a type of Mannerist drawing in a series of films he called “Drawings for Projection”; his claims for this innovation were characteristically modest. He likes to call his technique “stone-age animation.” Kentridge typically creates a film or video from ten to twenty sheets of paper. The easel or wall upon which the drawings rest does not move and the position of the 35 mm camera does not change. When Kentridge requires movement he creates it through the medium of his mark making. He adds a line and shoots; he erases a line and shoots. This is a quite different process from the thousands of hand-drawn cells used in conventional animation by Walt Disney or Warner Brothers. Since he cannot (or does not want to) completely erase the previous charcoal lines he's put to paper, the evidence of time passing and depicted distance is encapsulated in Degas-like pentimenti, traces of lines that reintroduce the tactility of painting and drawing into video art. The impossibility of erasing charcoal resonates with “the impossibility of ever truly blotting out personal memory or national history.”6 Sometimes Kentridge collages extra sheets of paper to extend the size of his drawings; the evidence of these attachments is also left visible in the resulting films. The improvisational nature of his mark making, the way addition and erasure create an entire scene on a single sheet of paper allows us to visualize the very act of creation. The palette of his films is quite limited; occasionally he uses bright blue, orange or red to heighten the emotional (ie, expressionistic) impact of a moment in the film. Kentridge eschews dialogue and actors but frames his visual compositions with soundtracks drawn from classical music and contemporary works by his previously unrecorded attorney-friend Philip Miller. In addition, the sound of a blow to the body, a gunshot or glass breaking is used with uncanny power. The first work in the series was called, somewhat sardonically, “Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris” (1989). The fifth and sixth are the most famous, “Felix in Exile” (1994) and “History of the Main Complaint” (1996). The ninth and most recent film “Tide Table” (2003) completed the original series. Several of the films contain hand-drawn representations of medical devices and radiographic studies, including CT scans and MRIs of the skull and brain. Kentridge is fascinated by medical equipment; perhaps not incidentally his wife is a physician. Kentridge's gift for metamorphic transformation of his images and objects introduces a surrealistic element into an otherwise expressionistic style with strong associations to the politically based art of Kathe Kollwitz, George Grosz and Max Beckmann (ie, German art of the Weimar period), as well as the seeming nonsense of European Dada after the First World War. We watch as multiple stethoscopes invade a patient's body or cats and clocks turn into bombs. Common themes reappear in each of the films: the struggle for democracy and the evil of apartheid. The major characters include Felix Teitelbaum, an artist and Kentridge's alter ego, who always appears nude, and Soho Ekstein, an elegantly dressed and a South African industrialist (mine owner) based on a close relative. In either case, Kentridge implicates himself in the action and in South Africa's collective guilt by modeling both their faces on his own. Felix and Soho never appear together but when Soho looks into the rear-view mirror of his car he sees the eyes of Felix. The art of Kentridge is an art of doubleness, black/white, Soho/Felix, damnation and redemption. Untitled or “Eye-to-Eye” (Kunsthalle, Bremen, Germany), the drawing on the cover of this issue, is featured in “Felix in Exile,” a film that places Felix in a Paris hotel room looking through a suitcase of drawings, all of which represent the slaughtered bodies of black protesters. Felix/Kentridge peers into his mirror while shaving and sees the image of Nandi's face, a South African black woman who represents a forbidden love object. She is both the Other and the Beloved. She is also the possible author of the drawings. Throughout the film we observe Nandi using a theodolite, a small telescope mounted on a tripod, to survey the landscape they both share and love. In this scene, the instrument connects them “eye to eye,” the unofficial name of the untitled drawing and an explicit example of doubling. The naked Felix in a room full of drawings used to make the film in which he appears recalls photographs of the real Kentridge posed naked in his studio surrounded by his work. Like the artist Nandi is a consummate professional and like South Africa, she is a subject that Felix can never completely understand. Nandi is later shot and Felix left alone and bereft in the landscape, his/her drawings shut up in a suitcase. At the moment of her death, a sudden eruption of sound signals his personal catastrophe, red blood flows out of the water tap in his sink, his blue memories overflow the cup in the drawing. “I have never tried to make illustrations of apartheid,” Kentridge has said. “But my drawings and films are certainly spawned by and feed off the brutalized society left in its wake. I am interested in a political art…an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings. An art—and a politics—in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay.”7 “Felix in Exile” is the last film in which Felix appears as the lead character; afterwards he is “exiled” from the series. Neurosurgeons and other readers who click on the link will get to see an interview in which Kentridge discusses his views on political art. In addition, the artist generously provides many of the key scenes from “History of the Main Complaint,” the companion film to “Felix in Exile.” Readers are certain to be fascinated by Kentridge's hand-drawn representations of medical technology and image-making, not to mention the guilt-born nightmares Soho experiences while in a coma. It is in this film that Soho, while driving and striking a black South African, sees the eyes of Felix in his rear-view mirror. Note the contrast between the advanced images of the brain and the old-fashioned typewriters, stamp machines, rotary telephones and other devices of South African corporate business practice. The multiplying pile-up of consultants at the bedside, many of whom bear a distinct resemblance to Mikhail Gorbachev, is an example of how Kentridge uses a subtle surrealism to produce humorous but serious commentary. The sick body and the body politic are one. The claim has been made that through his videos, Kentridge has paradoxically reinvigorated the use of traditional drawing in art, a technique seemingly threatened by the technological fluency that he employs in his work.1 Since “Drawings for Projection,” Kentridge has progressively introduced live action into his animations, filmed his own performances, directed puppet shows, designed sets and costumes for major opera productions like The Nose by Dimitri Shostakovich at the Metropolitan and Mozart's Magic Flute, built objects that contain projected images and sculpted models of figures used in his films. In short, Kentridge employs a range of artistic practice that bears comparison with the breadth of Pablo Picasso or Bruce Nauman. Like Nauman he does not paint but unlike his older contemporary Kentridge has a recognizable artistic signature, a visual style by which any work of his is recognizably “a Kentridge,” a unique product of his skill as a draughtsman and his heightened emotional sensibility. His compassion for the human situation is the ground bed of his politics and makes him much more than a “political artist”; his heavy heart never translates into heavy-handedness. In many other projects, his artistic buoyancy and obvious joy in creation leavens the seriousness of his intent and provides a truly adult view of contemporary society. Author’s Note: This article represents something of a departure for both myself as an art historian and for the journal. My wife and I were present at the epochal international show in which Kentridge “burst” upon the scene, have had the pleasure of meeting him at 2 retrospectives, and own some of his work. In a scientific article this would constitute a clear conflict of interest. It is only through the study of neurophysiology and the response to art of my own brain in particular that I can write about his work with any degree of objectivity. Furthermore, I’ve not previously had an opportunity to write about video art and it is impossible to write on this subject without discussing Kentridge. Neurosurgery has been a pioneering journal in many respects; that the readers of this article can click on a link and see a video in which Kentridge discusses the political nature of his videos and with characteristic generosity allows the reader to view most of “History of the Main Complaint,” is something of a miracle, one not previously provided by any magazine not primarily devoted to literary or artistic subjects.