Texts for self-evaluation seminar 2015

Essay on Method

In this text I will reflexively examine my practice over the past approximately six months that I have been studying here at The Piet Zwart Institute. I will do this through an examination of recent works in relation to broader ideas within my practice, setting concepts and aesthetic properties within a broader political/ art historical context. I began the Piet Zwart programme late due to taking part in a residency at Hospitalfield House in Arbroath (Scotland) and so had already started on some works by the time I arrived here. This was a research residency and I had spent my time there consuming and producing text. I was reading pretty didactic material around the themes of the debt economy, ‘immaterial’ labour and semiocapital, affect and the conditions of speech. I was also thinking a lot about the relationship between sound and image within film theory, defined by French theorist Michel Chion as the interplay between temporality and density. During the residency I was drawing connections between these different research areas, thinking about whether our current culture is one of sound or image, temporality or density and how these forms become cultures within themselves. I was working to a familiar methodology: that of taking an appropriated source and using it as a framework to produce my own material. In this case that was British Sounds by Jean Luc Godard. This is a film I had originally seen a few years ago. It is an experimental but still highly didactic study of labour relations in the U.K, made while Godard was still collaborating with the Dziga Vertov group. What attracted me to the film is both the fact that it was made in 1970; unbeknownst to the makers, a pivotal point in the shift from Fordist to Post-Fordist production in the U.K. Godard also made the work around a radical conjecture: images are too corrupted by capital to contain revolutionary potential, this is located is sound. Around this premise he structured British Sounds attempting to give the auditory priority over the visual within the context of film. I borrowed this framework from British Sounds giving myself the task of exploring contemporary labour relations and semiocapital through the medium of sound. I arrived on the masters programme with (a mess of) loose notes written around threads of interest I had identified. These I then began to take forward into works when I arrived here in Rotterdam. I will now focus on four recent works in some depth, which constituted a solo show in SWG3 Gallery, Glasgow in February 2015. The show was titled Ohmage a play on words both referring to ‘homage’ pronounced with a French accent and to ‘ohm’ the measurement of sound by the degree of resistance at reception. I will treat these as manifestations of thought processes and use them as points of access into the conceptual material I am grappling with. I will also try to deconstruct and analyze how working within the Piet Zwart has affected my thinking process and methodology.

Dumbcane The first work encountered within the SWG3 show is Dumbcane. This is an installation of Dieffenbachia plants (9 in total) growing under a hydroponic lamp suspended from the ceiling above them. Dieffenbachia are large, leafy, tropical plants which are poisonous if consumed. I chose to include these plants in the exhibition due to their strange and unique history, which I encountered within a Kathy Acker text. The plants were brought to Europe by slave owners as they were useful precisely for their toxicity. If slaves were talking out of turn, or attempting to self-organize the slavers would force them to chew or eat the leaves of the Dumbcane whose poisonous properties would attack the voice box rendering the subject mute for approximately 24 hours. In a further twist the plants are now one of the most popular species to brighten offices and corporate waiting spaces. I thought that these plants were an interesting metaphor for the former mutability of labour in early capitalist systems of primitive accumulation, a stark contrast to the current climate of semiocapital/ affective labour.

On reflection I have a lot of reservations about this work. On the one hand I think that it is good to draw attention to an under-recognised violent history, within a narrative of repression crucial to primitive accumulation. However, I also feel uncomfortable with my potential exploitation of this history to which I do not have embodied access as a white, middle-class European. I am aware of the violence inherent in speaking on behalf of others, and am keen to appropriate within an ethical framework even if this may sound like an oxymoron(?)

Silent Film The second work the viewer encounters in the exhibition is the first I made at The Piet Zwart it is a 16mm film piece. I contacted numerous call centres within the Rotterdam area to ask for permission to film the interior in 16mm. After several negative responses from companies a large call centre in North Rotterdam called the GDCC replied positively. Angharad and Adam both offered to help with the filming and assisted me in carrying the camera equipment over to the GDCC after the staff had left at night and coordinating the dolly and two cameras. Within the call centre we took sweeping shots over the computers and communication apparatus and panned over the large office space using available lighting. I then had the footage processed with another reel I had shot before I arrived in Rotterdam of MTV music videos filmed from an LCD screen in 16mm. The camera zooms in on particular moments within the music videos creating a collage of temporal images choreographed to an absent soundtrack. I showed both reels within my first critique and gratefully received feedback on the work. After hearing others’ opinions and having a chance to personally reflect on the work I ultimately edited the call centre footage out of the final piece. This felt like a drastic decision to make, however I felt in the context of the exhibition where the work was shown there was enough allusions to labour relations that the call centre footage felt overly didactic and heavy-handed. The work that was finally shown in SWG3 gallery in Glasgow was a three-minute 16mm silent film showing MTV footage projected onto a suspended sheet of thick grey felt. The felt surface added another textural element to the work, further compromising any glossy sheen that may remain in the MTV videos. The choice of felt as projection surface was both due to it being used as a medium to absorb sound and because of its composition: The fibres of felt are integrated rather than woven leading to Deleuze and Guattari using it as an example of smooth rather than striated space in their text A Thousand Plateaus. This sculpturally/conceptually connected the work to another within the show smooth talker/striated silence which I will describe and discuss later in this text.

Umemaro 3D Takeout Pizza Obscenity (In The Key of Freddy Buache) … is a digital video work. The image is set small and off-centre within the frame. It depicts an urban street scene in a busy shopping area. After a few seconds a hand holding an iPhone comes into the shot and a thumb presses play on a youtube video already loaded on the touch screen. On the iPhone a video of an orchestra begins to play. The image of the hand holding the iPhone against the backdrop of the busy shopping street continues while a voice over starts to speak a narrative. This is a story I wrote which is being read by a French text-to-speech programme. This software does not speak English and so is grossly mispronouncing the words as it speaks them aloud. In the exhibition press release the piece is described as follows:

The absent male French cinematographer relays a poetic account of a virtual relationship between ‘I’ and ‘he’. At once geographically apart and physically together, the protagonists are unified by language and a common medium. Just as the synthesized voice struggles to translate the written script – recomposing the familiar letters into francophonic clauses – so too the incongruous elements of the romance resist assimilation into a regular narrative. In this work I was interested in collaging multiple modes of address and subjectivities. I wrote the narrated text in the film from the perspective of a character within a Hentai animated porn film. I then adopted the voice of a male French cinematographer to relay her subjective experience. Overall reflections on my practice Following the show I recently undertook in Glasgow I have had some time to critically reflect on my practice as a whole. I feel in the first months that I was here at The Piet Zwart I was unable to deconstruct my practice fully as I had the work for the show in Glasgow already underway and was holding on to familiar themes and methodologies to continue being able to produce. This felt frustrating and limiting at times like I could not fully engage with what was offered by the Piet Zwart’s programme and intense dialogue around practice. I felt a sense of exhaustion since completing the exhibition. I would like to develop my next work quite slowly giving myself time and space to fully engage with the programme here and to deeply question the form and content of my next works. Kari Robertson, 2015