Nick Q's
THE GHOST OF ARTWORKS PAST
-what?- In the corner of the exhibition space is a doorway which has been partially boarded up with cardboard. At the bottom of the doorway a flatscreen monitor is set into the cardboard, in a recession built into the structure, forming a short tunnel, maybe a metre long. You have to crouch, or kneel, or squat, or lie on the floor to see the work properly. The monitor shows a four-minute video piece, with sound. A camera moves at floor level around a space that is not the exhibition space, cutting between different rooms of an old building. The sound of the camera being pushed along the floor creates a sense of animism, of the camera having its own vitality or agency.
-how?- The video was made simply, by pushing my camera around the floor of a building where I was on residency. The sound was recorded on the camera’s internal microphone. The installation was also a simple setup using a monitor and speakers, cardboard and duct-tape.
-why?- I was interested in how you create the idea of agency and animism through the movement of a camera, and in the cinematic history of the camera representing itself through movement. I had the idea of creating a subaltern cinema, with the subject being that of a rat or other small intruder.
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-how does it realte to previous works?- The work relates to a long-held interest in the history of cinema, and the ways in which video and installation can abstract or isolate cinematic devices. Previous works have been literal deconstructions of video equipment such as projectors. There are questions of how to reconstitute cinematic perception and the subjective relationship to art and/or cinema.
-what is its relationship to a scene/community?- I was interested in historical (‘60s/’70s/’80s) approaches to expanded cinema, which seemed to be undergoing something of a resurgence around the time I was making the work. Glasgow, its art community and various institutions which brought international work to the city were undoubtedly important to the germination of the piece. The influence of organisations like LUX was similarly crucial.
-what is the broader context?- There is a general interest in mediation, in common with much contemporary art which drives the work. The space of contemporary art perhaps allows you to step back from 24 hour news cycles and social media in order to attempt a deeper view, or a more historical one, or to consider things from a different angle, to figure the context from which contemporary phenomena emerge.
THE GHOST OF ARTWORKS PRESENT
-what?- The work is a floor-based installation incorporating various elements, including tennis balls, computer-printed imagery, crumpled paper, a pomodoro timer and modular origami. I am going to start introducing sound elements through speakers embedded in the tennis balls. Previously, I read out a text considering the uses of metaphor in political discourse, but I have removed this aspect from the work.
-how?- Most of the elements of the work are found or bought objects, things that were easily to hand. The images were taken from the internet and printed on the PZI printer. The work is a coming-together of various things: the tennis balls from amateur motion-capture technology, the images from research into Dutch Polders and land art, the rest objects that had been sitting in studio waiting to be used.
-how is it similar to previous works?- The use of sound in relation to visual material is a combination that I have explored before, and there is a sense of animism, in common with previous work. The consideration of political form, abstraction and metaphor are all long-held interests. Games, timing, playfulness are all recurring themes.
-how is it different from previous works?- The work did incorporate video in its first iteration, though really only as a container for text, and future iterations are unlikely to have any moving image element, in contrast with previous work. An entirely floor-based installation is a new method of presenting a piece, and many of the materials used are also new. The introduction of a text is also relatively new, though it is something I have been starting to incorporate in my work.
-who has been helpful in the production of the work?- Tutors, peers and time have all helped provide the distance required after the first iteration of the work, to reconsider it and think how it could be improved. Presenting the work in a group crit was invaluable to understanding how an audience might interact with the work as an installation, in space. Making the work is essential to its making.
THE GHOST OF ARTWORKS YET TO COME
-what?- The work will be a performance, probably in a dark space. I will be wearing an imitation of a motion-capture suit – black with small white balls attached to it at regular intervals – and speaking a text which forms one half of a conversation, as though on the phone to someone, or receiving radio instructions. The form of the conversation is not completely clear – perhaps some kind of wage-labour relationship, or something more abstract. A power dynamic with an unseen other, like something from a Beckett play.
-how is it useful for you?- I want to continue to push myself to make performance, and this piece is a way to bring together ideas around performance art as labour and contemporary labour as a constant ‘performing’ (drawing on writing by Claire Bishop, among others). Writing the text would also be a useful exercise and challenge. The motion-capture suit links nicely with previous work, and brings in a visual signifier of rationality or logic.