Never when it happens. Only afterwards.
The task of writing a text about videos and happiness requires finding an angle from which to explore their relationship; a common element that will enable me to discuss a selection of videos responding to ideas related to the pursuit of happiness.
What comes first to my mind is the difference between the two; video is a physical, and mechanical, mode of reproducing the surroundings, while happiness is a very abstract and intangible feeling brought forth by the experience of something. The former is a tool for rendering reality and the latter an index of our satisfaction with reality.
But what could the connection of the two be? Their both being tied to reality, their subjective nature or something else?
In the concept of time, I suppose; in the idea of the afterwards.
“When were you happiest?
A few times when I looked forward to a happy moment or remembered it - never when it was happening.”
The above excerpt from Slavoj Žižek's interview published in The Guardian[1] suggests that happiness is not felt at the same moment an event occurs. Despite being tied to a specific circumstance, happiness is a feeling experienced either at an earlier or later moment than that of the event itself; that is the time of expectation or post-reflection. Because I conceive expectation as an equivalent to excitement or longing, which to me differ from happiness, I will concentrate on the idea of the afterwards, of the later on.
Happiness is often not in the present. It is probably because happiness is different than pleasure, satisfaction or contentness. Unlike these feelings, happiness steps out of the moment and becomes manifest at a later stage, when things are looked from a certain distance. Perhaps, the central point is that happiness is at a degree of removal from the moment to which it directly refers; it seems to be detached from the concept of the in real time.
Even historically, the pursuit of happiness has been related to the concept of the afterwards. An example could be that of some socialist ideals that proposed regulated ways of living one's life in order to achieve the ultimate happiness.
As for this, the instance of Modernist architecture is emblematic, since it was more concerned with the future than with the present or past. Its aim was to improve the living environment by building housing estates, creating alternative urban conglomerations as well as experimenting with new possibilities of interior design. It did so in order to lay down the basis for the regeneration of society; better still, to initiate the process of creating a better society for future generations. These attempts exemplify to what extent Modernist architecture was related to projections and also, I would add, to the erasure of an unwanted past (by being inefficient to its cause). But I will expand on the latter point apropos the videos I selected for this text.
Going back to the video, I think that some of the properties I attributed to happiness can apply to its nature.
Video is not in the present time either. As happiness, video steps out of the moment; it is in a past than can only be experienced afterwards. Its content is always a re-working of an event in real time; if not, when the video is scripted, it is still something far away from the idea of spontaneous creation. And its content is always deciphered in the future.
Video entails a certain degree of removal too. Literally there is a lens that separates the surroundings and the filmmaker; there is a distance between what is shot and the person who shoots, and this distance is due to the decisions made at the time of filming. Yet, there is a gap between the content and the original material in that the editing process, no matter how much it is elaborated, produces changes and alterations. Even in the instance of a video shot in only one long take, some choices are made; choices that eliminate the possibilities of existence of other ways of rendering the original event.
Pasolini elaborates on the relationship between time and video in his essay “Observations on the long take[2]”:
But as soon as montage intervenes, when we pass from cinema to film (they are very different, just as langue is different from parole), the present becomes past: a past that, for cinematographic and not aesthetic reasons, is always in the present mode (that is, it is an historic present).
Pasolini introduces the idea of an historic present, a present that refers to a past or, even better, the historical present of the cinema, which looks at a present that has become past at the moment of filming and its experienced later on.
In Faded Reminders by Siobhan Wanklyn (2007), the pursuit of happiness is related to the exploration of three German Modernist locations. The focus is on the relationship between the video format and architecture, which is rendered through a dance between the camera and the urban landscape. The opening track shot examines a Modernist city that is depicted in negative, in the mode of an X-ray scan. This choice seems to hint at the dramatic reversal of meaning that Modernist ideals have undergone over history. To strengthen this shift, the artist animates the hyper-geometrical features of the buildings by playing with the camera movement, which, similarly to a fly, peruses the surroundings.
The video becomes a means for actualising a past that is lost; a past of which only a monument bears evidence of its existence.
Wanklyn's work searches for something that is not there (a past existing before the Modernist regeneration as well as a present that still awaits a better future to come); an attempt that has some similarities with the video of Fani Zguro, Nox (2004-2007).
Nox is a collage of film footage taken by the artist in 2004, which was then edited in 2007. It is a series of jump cuts proposing what, at a first sight, seems to be a random order of various nocturnal urban views. Images of buildings are proposed along with those of inhabited alleys and indiscernible people that are filmed while doing something or walking down the streets, leaving us to wonder about the eventual scope of their activities. The soundtrack heightens the fragmentation of the material offered to the viewer by sharply moving in between silent periods and moments filled with the noise of alarms and drills at work.
The video proposes a past that has been revitalised by putting pieces of a city nightlife into a sequence that acquires its raison d'être only when looked at from a certain distance; a distance produced by both Zguro's choice to shoot the footage in the night time and edit it three years later.
In the spaces of the two videos chronological time is put on hold, and yet, what resonates in the idle periods of Faded Reminders and Nox is the future. This future is exactly that stepping out of the moment I introduced before, which gives a new function, as well as an additional meaning, to the material used by the artists. The past is incorporated into a present that becomes a future in relation to the position of the viewer.
The afterwards of which I have been writing about is the resonance of something that has already happened, likewise the feeling of happiness and the recording of a camera, which are the reverberations of a moment that has already been experienced by the person that feels and by the one who shoots.
[1] Rosanna Greenstreet , The Q&A, in the Life&Style series, Weekeend Guardian; The Guardian, 9 August 2008, pg. 9, London or http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/09/slavoj.zizek
[2] Pier Paolo Pasolini, Observations on the Long Take, 1967, translated by N. MacAfee and C. Owens in October, issue n. 13, 1980; Rober Smithson, A cinematic Atopia, 1971, in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edit by Jack Flam, University of California Press, 1996, Los Angeles
O autorce:/ About the Author:
Marialaura Ghidini (b. 1980, Italy) is an independent curator based in London. She obtained her MA in Critical Writing and Curatorial Practice at Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2008. Recently she co-funded with Gaia Tedone 'Ping Pong', a curatorial double act that organizes video and film programmes, such as 'Back and Forth. And all over again' and 'Screen-play' at the James Taylor Gallery (London, 2009). She writes for the online magazine domusweb and is currently working on developing the web project or-bits.com. Past projects are the group exhibitions 'shot-countershot' and 'in and out of synch' at Chelsea College of Art and Design (London, 2008), the co-curated video screening 'Brilliant Noise' at Tate Britain, (2008) and the art event 'Cocktail' at the gallery at Wimbledon, London (2008).
Brak komentarzy:
Prześlij komentarz