User:Astrid van Nimwegen/2nd draft gradproposal

‘Portraits of the everyday’

Currently I am experimenting on a series of moving images, which consist of simple videos of Dutch landscapes seen from out a garage door that is opening first and closing again after two minutes. I record the same wide shot multiple times with a static camera. You see leaves moving; the weather changing and the light in those different shots is never the same. Next to this I am looking for other landscape videos that speak in a way the same language.

In my BA I developed a working method in which I mostly performed in my black and white videos, there was a certain strength and purity in those images and also my interest towards the complexity within our existence came clearly forward through my simple, minimalist videoregistrations. Those pieces strongly refer to video performance art from the 60’s and 70’s. I wanted to move beyond the performance videos and after my video piece recorded in 2010 called ‘the Gravediggers’ in which I stood naked in a farming field while four man, dressed as gravediggers, digs a circle around me, I decided to step out of my videos and started to work more with other characters. This was also the moment when I just had moved back to the island where I grew up and came to live in the middle of the Dutch polders, the influence of this flat, isolated landscape is clearly visible in my work. I think ‘the Gravediggers’ piece especially raised a lot of questions about theatre and staging on which I wanted to research further when I entered the PZI master programme. One thing for sure is that in all cases, all the elements in the video works are always carefully considered and very deliberate. But in the works I created last year there always was too much going on, in this I missed the mode of attention within the work.

For example, in the second trimester I recorded a short film, consisting out of three elements, which came together in one landscape. A violin player in a red dress walks towards a big tree where a dead deer dangles from a side branch. The second element was a fisherman who drives into the frame in a red car; he takes a bucket filled with water out of the trunk, sits down on a chair and starts fishing in the bucket. The third element was five hunters who cross the landscape back and forward with a dead hare in one hand and a riffle in the other. There is completely no interaction between the characters; this resulted in an absurdist reality in which everything was too much staged. The three elements were connected in time and place without a meaning. I think I tried to overwhelm the videos with content in order to remain emptiness and meaninglessness. I thought, if the image has to carry too much content, there has to be a point where it breaks into something meaningless but strong. Mainly because of the use of symbols, it did not work the way I expected. The viewer was only looking for a narrative behind all those vague actions and symbols on the screen. I guess this reality was too much directed by me and looking back on it now, I can conclude that I was creating images which pretends to be more than reality itself… The gestures are way to big and even destroy the subtle purity of the everyday.

Another work was about an over weighted man who digs his own grave in the middle of a farming field, only wearing white underpants. It remains mysterious how something translated that literal starts to communicate different meaning; in the end it was not at all about a pathetic figure but more about the beauty of his body and the guys huge commitment to the digging. But here I felt that the thing was just too much ‘what it was’ and where I often like the directness of a work, this was really some bite-size chunk in the end… What I did like was the place where the performance took place; the ordinary landscape was suddenly the stage for all kind of acting.

Those last two works described above were in colour, which also brought a big difference along if compared with my older works. But still I was busy with particular ‘performance’ in typical ‘everyday’ scenes which become very absurdist because the combination of those latter two elements.

In the third trimester I worked on a piece called ‘Human constraints’. I started to play with sets of rules that formed the formal structure beneath the video works. Creating a set of parameters that allows you to create videos of which you cannot predict the outcome was my field of research. A red line in my methodology is that I always choose a frame in which every element is deliberate but by this I also create a space where ‘chance’ can take place. Somehow the chance becomes in this way also a deliberate choice.

I researched into Dogma rules, Eisenstein, Oulipo Compendium and the Morphology of the Folktale by Vladimir Propp. And I recognized the structuralist side of my methodology in this creation of parameters behind the work.

A one legged man and a woman with a walker are displayed in a field with several white circular signs. They walk together from one spot to the next. The shot is literally ‘framed’ with white lines painted on the ground. The characters are clearly following stage directions but it remains unclear what those directions are about. At the end of the third trimester there was an exhibition in Worm where I projected two videos based on specific rules. Next to the videos, a rulebook was presented in which you could read the ‘script’ of the pieces.

After those interesting outcomes I took some distant from the work and decided that those constraints are important indeed but not important enough to be the main theme of my work. There is a formal side of my methodology but also a very strong intuitive side, and this latter is maybe the most important side that I truly want to follow and is closest to my heart as an artist. It doesn’t make sense at all to make works in which the formal is the most important matter.

Everyday I record the same shot of a garage door. The video begins with the garage door closed; then the door opens as if the curtains of a stage open. A colourful landscape becomes visible. The atmosphere is quite melancholic and isolated, as if the drama already is there within the staging itself. The duration of the shot ensures that each element in the frame is given attention. A single leave blows away; the trees move slowly in the wind; the treetops in the distance are covered with morning sunlight. Then the door closes again after two minutes. On one day we see it raining, on another day it is dry but windy, sometimes a dog walks by.

So now I am back to my minimalistic way of working in which I play literally with the staging of the everyday and also with endurance and repetition. I use my intuition more to recognize the poetic, minimalistic portraits of the everyday, sometimes these are only landscape videos, and sometimes characters are involved in this everyday but that only works when they are not acting and thus are not too aware of the camera. Since every element really needs careful attention, I consider recording the garage-door piece with a professional camera that capture every little movement and allows you to really count every leave. Also the soundtrack has to become really precise. I was searching for a way to bring all my pieces together to let them form each others context somehow but I restricted myself because this work it is not allowing me to add elements. It is immediately loosing strength when I do so. I found a great way to reveal the complexity of life through a very simple manner.

The images which reveal complexity behind the simple are to be found in the everyday so I want to search in this everyday and use my intuition to find and recognize them. Maybe my most made mistake is to make the simple complex instead of the other way around and therefore a lot of older video’s I did not found convincing enough. My field of research is now to experiment further with my landscape videos.

Different ways to explore this are: -To bring them together in an installation or collection; -To edit them somehow in a linear timeline; -To show the garage door video’s in a cinema as a short before the feature film; -To project them in other landscapes; -To let some small gestures take place in the landscape to see if this can add something

Relation to a larger context:

In theory I am currently reading 'Theatre & Everyday Life' by Alan Read and 'Everyday Life and Cultural Theory' by Ben Highmore. Of some chapters I want to write annotations and also want to describe work by Bas Jan Ader.

Bas Jan Ader / Abramovic / Scandinivian Films (dogma?) / Theatre of the everyday / Avant garde Cinema / Documentary / Minimalist art / Landscape Painting / Poetry / the Everyday / Psychoanalyse - Freud / Performance art

References:

• 'Theatre & Everyday Life' by Alan Read
• 'Everyday Life and Cultural Theory' by Ben Highmore
• 'Essays on the blurring of life and art' by Allan Kaprow
• 'Tacita Dean' by Tacita Dean
• Work of Bas Jan Ader
• Work of Marina Abramovic
• Films by Roy Andersson a Swedish director
• Work of Peter Greenaway (videoprojections on paintings)

Context/Other works:

• [1]

(Bas Jan Ader – Nightfall)

• [2]

(Marina Abramovic – Confession)

• [3]

(Photo’s ‘Confession’)

• [4]

(Roy Andersson – Songs from the second floor)

• [5]

(Peter Greenaway – Drowning by numbers)

Keywords:

• The Everyday
• Purity
• Time
• Minimalistic
• Surreal