archipelago: AFTER WORK (2022)

survey of works by Celine Condorelli, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh

- So far these notes have often been attempting to follow a trajectory proposed by Jacques Rancière, of artworks as a space that allows for the making-real of something materially possible, the production of an alternative, a politicised aesthetic process. In The Emancipated Spectator he wrote “The point is not to counter-pose reality to its appearances. It is to construct different realities, different forms of common sense - that is to say, different spatiotemporal systems, different communities of words and things, forms and meanings”.

- A development from writing about this so far has been that this is theoretically all well and good, but (happily) leaves a space open: what exactly will these different realities or space-time configurations consist of? What will they propose? How will these proposals relate to the status quo? Celine Condorelli's practice might be carrying out this concrete work, by mining into history and by actually building spaces.

- This was one way to read and process the variety of this retrospective of works (though it inevitably came up against limits), which was presented as a series of spaces, usually engaging with histories of architecture and industry. Engaging with these histories formed the basis of the concrete nature of the works shown, ideas and proposals for space and construction were actually made. Each space was quite distinct, and often each invited contributions from other artists, leading to a transformation of the series of gallery rooms into a sort of democratic archipelago of different proposals and ideas. A fragment of text from the exhibition stated: "We have joined together to execute functional constructions and to alter or refurbish existing structures as a means of surviving in a capitalist economy".

account of visit:

- The first space featured structures inspired by the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, including simple designs for sun shades held in place by stones and ropes, and a rock garden with tropical plants. Alongside these constructions was an intervention in the opposite direction, to remove parts of the gallery walls, revealing windows that are usually obscured. This had a threefold effect. First, it let an element of chance into the space, allowing bars of sunlight in motion to be cast into the room. Second, it created a view into the city outside, which was dominated by scaffolding on a building opposite, the ever-present image of constant development. This led to the third effect, an opening up of the space of proposal to include a view of what an alternative is being proposed to (a brilliant and essential idea for this idea of practice). 

- Another space featured a presentation of AFTER WORK (2022), a collaborative 16mm film made with Ben Rivers and poet Jay Bernard, which documents the construction of a children's playground designed by Condorelli. The soundtrack is a reading of a poem by Bernard. Again the context around the construction of a new design is never forgotten, with accounts on the soundtrack of life in the city or images in the film of animals coming out at night around the playground. The elements of the film are allowed to remain independent from each other yet cohere, appropriately as a sort of game being played with each other; the construction in workshops of different playground elements is a great opportunity to play with different camera effects, while the poem on the soundtrack delights in games of language and recollection. The montage itself becomes a form of play for the authors to create different combinations of images, and it creates a playground for the viewer to play in. The space the film was shown in pushed this further, containing elements of the playground design. Saw this film earlier in the year at a different exhibition and it was interesting to see it twice months apart, some images from the first time were stuck firmly in the head, while others suddenly appeared as though never previously encountered, like a white cat leaping (out of forgetfulness). 

Work by Grace Ndiritu in the installation "Thinking through skin"

- The final and largest space in the retrospective was a collaborative multi-media space which featured works by Condorelli as well as many other artists, including Grace Ndiritu and Isa Genzken. This space, despite including an enormous number of works of great depth, managed to avoid spilling into the overwhelming glut of information these spaces can sometimes become. This was achieved by using a soundtrack which joined the works together without becoming too intrusive, allowing each to still remain separate within the overall union. Natural light was allowed again to enter the space, letting the world in again rather than creating a cut off space of pure intentions. The works were well placed within the space and it was comfortable to move around with places to sit. The overall effect was a kind of three dimensional film constructed from other films, as well as pictures and objects, a work made of works, and a calm yet engaging place to think and listen.

- This assembly of works was surrounded above by an installation in a series of old vitrines which brought together different research objects, including postcards, ceramics and spinning tops. These objects were allowed to remain tangential and open to interpretation.

- Throughout the show there were also smaller spaces dedicated to different series of wall pieces, each using visual montage to open up and activate ideas and histories. There were prints based on playground designs by Jacoba Mulder and Aldo van Eyck which produced another set of games for the eye; montages revealing the colonialist histories of plants commonly used in offices, houses, hotels and the Museum of Modern Art; and prints based on an extended residency at a tyre factory which brought together images of rubber plantations, documents from the company magazine and photographs by Enzo Nocera showing the realities of industrial life.

poemwork: ME AND MY BIKE (1948)

 - This is the first in a series of notes attempting to chart some possible relations between written texts, particularly poems, and the moving image.

- ME AND MY BIKE is an unfinished film script by Dylan Thomas, though it does not read like a conventional script. According to the foreword by producer Sydney Box, Thomas stated in relation to this text "I want to write the first original film operetta". As such most of the dialogue is intended to be sung, some of it by animal characters, for instance a stable full of horses with Yorkshire accents who sing about oats. Therefore the published text is not formatted as a script, but as a series of songs in verse form intercut with prose paragraphs detailing the rest of the movement of the possible film. These prose sections have a visual style which pushes in three directions. 

The first direction is towards a static, pictorial, illustrative visual style, toward painting and drawing (which is helped along in the published version by illustrations by Leonora Box). This is evident in the first sentence: "We see, in half-darkness, a large country house". Subsequently: "Two candles are lit behind the two little curtained windows above the stables. A wooden stair reaches from the rooms above the stables to the yard". This is a neat picture of where the main character, Fred the stable boy, lives.

The second direction is a transition between the first and third, and is toward animation. The singing horses grin, roll their eyes and kick a sack of oats out of a stable boy's hands; though it was apparently not Thomas' intention to write an animated film, it's difficult to read these actions without that idea occuring. The movement to the third direction becomes clearer in the nature of the transitions between events in the text: "Fred scrambles through his washing, runs a horse-comb through his hair, and climbs another flight of wooden steps that leads from the yard to the granary". The picture of the setting created in the first direction is extended into comic motion.

The third direction, the one we are really concerned with, is towards a photographed moving image, but not in the simple, conventional relation a script normally has. Instead the writing is itself constructed of images in motion, cuts and transitions, producing a cinema which did not, perhaps does not, yet exist. 

/not in an anachronistic way - not projecting later developments into texts from the past, but rooting a possible contemporary practice in the unfulfilled promise of various texts, finding possible new avenues from different points of origin. finding other examples of this kind of forward-moving writing as the basis for a series of notes/

An idea of the normal relation between script and image is still visible - a picturing of a production of the text in the style of Ealing films of the late 40s; a square black and white frame, slow camera movements, slightly scratchy overdubbed sound. Overlaid on top of this is a different picture closer to the text itself. This picture is faithful to the level of detail in the text, particularly the attention paid to sounds:

"As he opens the granary door, he looks around him at the park, growing lighter, at the wide frosty paddocks with their gate and water jumps, and at the great manor house, slow wisps of smoke coming out of its chimneys. A cock crows, far away, then its morning warning is taken up here and there from the manor house and the farms beyond."

This short passage presents an extremely sophisticated montage, featuring radical changes of scale and accumulative layering of different sounds.

/struggling to get at the idea here. imaginary films in the minds eye, slow survey of a park with ice on the grass, cutting to the curly smoke rising from the red chimney pot. the farms beyond, a way to make a picture of the sense you get from the word "beyond". a film that could show these movements in detail - not that some haven't been made. the point isn't that the older mode of production was inadequate, or that writing allows different transitions than moving images. is the point a possible film?/

- This third visual style, a possible-cinematographic style, is not simply the result of someone producing an imaginative film script. It's even more evident in an earlier story by Thomas, THE MOUSE AND THE WOMAN from 1936. There is a passage in this story where someone wakes up in the dark and can still see the carousel of images from their dreams. These striking pictures are linked by striking transitions that would be quite possible to achieve with a camera. 

"... there were symbols he could not remember, they came and went so quickly with the rattle of leaves, the gestures of women's hands spelling on the sky, the falling of rain and the humming wind."

/wouldn't this make such a lovely sequence as an arrangement of pictures, cuts and noises?/

"The dream had changed. Where the women were was an avenue of trees. And the trees leant forward and interlaced their hands, turning into a black forest. He had seen himself, absurd in his nakedness, walk into the depths. Stepping on a dead twig, he was bitten."

/a double exposure of hands joining together matched with a natural arch of trees in motion, fading into the same setting at night. a figure walks down the middle, the sound of the branches moving in the wind is interrupted by the amplified noise of a snapping twig/

"Candle light threw the shadows of the room into confusion, and raised up the warped men of shadow out of the corners. For the first time he heard the clock. He had been deaf until then to everything except the wind outside the window and the clean winter sounds of the night-world. But now the steady tick tock tick sounded like the heart of someone hidden in his room"

/slow addition of overlaid sounds/

Particularly interesting is the final paragraph of the passage which features a cut accompanied by a long distance jump and change in scale:

"...he saw a block of paper and sat down at the table with a pencil poised in his hand. A hawk flew over the hill. Seagulls, on spread, unmoving wings, cried past the window. A mother rat, in a hole in the hillside near the holes of rabbits, suckled its young as the sun climbed higher in the clouds."

/maybe this series will be a series of ideas for adapting texts/

- Some of the sequences from L'ATALANTE (1934) approach the structure of these texts, for instance the double exposure sequence when the two characters are separated from each other.

Or there's RYSOPIS (1964) which begins with someone waking in the darkness and lighting the frame with a match, before walking out into the street where slowly more and more figures emerge, ultimately ending the sequence with huge shadows cast on the walls of a tall building. The film cuts in sudden long jumps between spaces and playful images, sometimes people address the camera; the frame is dominated by an enormous heap of scrap before moving to a hand manipulating a clock, a mirror in the centre of the image, or a dogs head taking up half the picture.

chance: Advertising Moving Imaging

Notes based on a series of television adverts seen in the breaks of a football broadcast.

- Adverts defy attempts to conclude, to rationalise, to attempt to find patterns, to think, and to draw anything but the most obvious conclusions. They move too quickly to comprehend, they seem to function without a pattern. They reproduce in the mind as signals without form, half-remembered sounds. Will they reproduce here? You cannot learn anything from them - can you? 

- For instance, could you retain any credibility by borrowing the language of adverts for a sincere purpose? It's a truism that advertising sucks up ideas from artists, especially when artists try to defy advertising, and that sometimes this process has gone the other way. Is there a way to go beyond this dualistic dynamic? Something not based on trying to follow the difficult value of authenticity.

- Adverts use the language of contemporary commercial cinema: the two become ever more indistinguishable, particularly in the region of sound (the situationist ideas of detournement and subverting advertising, and those of artists appropriating advertising, are usually visual in nature - what would this sound like?). That booming sound of the cinema, and the way it is cut into suddenly, suddenly there's the noise of a gas hob from close up, extremely loud. There are two adverts for cinema releases here, new Hollywood films with premises based entirely on well known products. Aspect ratios change from clip to clip, sometimes using a false widescreen effect that still signals cinema.

- There's a consistency of tone (also from the cinema?) on a spectrum from a jolly, false humour to pure sentimentality. At one end there's the weirdness of something that has all the construction of humour without being funny (particularly popular is animals carrying out various human activities). At the other there's a completely cynical use of diluted liberal values shorn of any context or idea of political change. Is it worth writing about this at all?

- What is competition? What is the market? Something vicious, underhand, bulls, profit, cutting costs down to the bone, something that is rendered invisible here, along with the actual visceral nature of production lines. Maybe there is no competition, and the odd cosiness of advertising reflects the monopoly. 

- Avoiding the discourse of the manipulated audience - is advertising often simply ignored? Then again there's always the uncomfortable, alienating and disturbing moment of noticing yourself tearing up at an advert, despite knowing what is on the screen is complete nonsense.

- Recently noticed there are more and more videos online where people have noticed the way everyday moving images are constructed, then perfectly recreate their rhythms for the purpose of parody (adverts and the way BBC series are edited is a particular target). How does the online space compare with the television adverts?

- The overall impression of the world given by adverts is that of life averaged down, without the hint of any possibility of something else. The key image is that of a street that is recognisable but does not exist, a street of detached houses neither fancy nor run-down, beneath a forever blue sky.

- Recurring motifs: people turning into cartoon characters, symphonic music with booming drums, people flying into the air. The flying consumer is particularly prevalent. Why is this image of escape the most popular?

- More than any of these is the image of motion (the economy in motion). Marathon runners, chemicals being synthesised into new formulas, people stomping across entire cities, the camera tracking fast through restaurant kitchens, dishes pushed at speed toward the lens, foodstuffs tumbling through the air, brand new cars speeding in silence towards the interchangeable skylines of unnamed North American cities, and flames.

Notes On Notes No. 1

- don't want to deal here with intentions, only ideas for going forward, produced so far from an actual practice of writing 

- notes not as a critical or academic project but as a piece of creative writing, charting a little adventure (an adventure of mistaking images of places as places themselves? or an adventure of images of places as the (democratic?) creation of new and possible places?)

- notes as extracting imaginative ideas from the works engaged with, always with a mind toward the production of moving image work

- an attempt to consider a broad range of  moving images and construct relations with other fields, to do something difficult, tread different paths