User:Astrid van Nimwegen/Description of work

An old projector lies on its side on a small table; the sound of film running through, fills the room. A moving black and white projection of a tree in an empty landscape with the setting sun in the background appears on a small screen opposite to the projector. The film is shot from a fixed position and the movement in it seems mostly caused by the change of light of the setting sun. Closer to the projector you see the film running through and the projected tree is obviously caused by the frames running quickly one by one in-between the lens and the projector lamp. The film runs in a loop of a few seconds, the same shot runs by over and over again.

There also is a television on the floor; a black and white video of a running 16mm film is visible on the screen. The silhouette of the same tree is recognized. It appears the video is a live streaming; a small video camera shooting it, is on a tripod, placed close to the old projector. Because it is a close up shot, it differs from our own vision when we look at the projector itself.

The third mode in the installation is a Polaroid photograph; it is the same image of the empty landscape with the tree again. Here, the tree seems more like a still image of a memory.

The main thing I was interested in, was 16mm film and the difference in content within the medium film and video. In earlier works, the video camera only was used as a tool to register a movement or action in a certain time sequence. Since the use of 16mm film I learned a lot more about the history of my medium and filmmaking itself. I became more conscious about what film exactly is and why it is that suitable for the work I make.

Film itself is in certain sense making time physical in 24 images a second. Magnetic videotape does not have a physical body without the use of an interface. So by changing the medium, the content of the work shifted from something outside the medium into the medium itself.

I started a process full of experiments with editing on the filmstrip itself and exposing filmstrips in a pinhole box. The outcome was not very convincing to me. I did succeed in transforming a moving image, seen in a camera obscura, into a different movement but it was so abstract and conceptual that I did not recognized my own handwriting in it any longer. Because every frame was different, my subject, a tree, became unrecognizable while running through a projector.

But more important, by reflecting onto the working process I am able to expose a meaning of the things. Meaning grows out of new awareness. So the process itself can become the work. The same thing happens when I describe things, through description and thus a renewed consciousness, a meaning exposes.

In the book ‘essays on the blurring of art and life’ (1993, 2003) Allan Kaprow talks also about this fact. When you are conscious again about things in daily life, things change instantly. For example, brushing your teeth is a daily returning thing and most of us are unconscious about it. When you are aware of it again, the action gets new meaning. And brushing your tooth changes. So meaning lies in our own experience and in our perception and interpretation.

Allan Kaprow, seen as the father of ‘the happenings’ is also questioning the meaning of art and life in his essays; his whole theory seems based on the meaning created by individual perception and interpretation. The things themselves have no consciousness; humans give things consciousness In this concept, he explains the difference between life-like art and art-like art, which I found very interesting.

The main difference between the two is that with life-like art, life and art are inextricably interwoven; you can say that art is living and life is art. So every thing you do, then becomes art. ‘In “the Meaning of Life” Kaprow writes that “lifelike art plays somewhere in and between attention to physical process and attention to interpretation”. The object of such attention is consciousness in its fullest sense’ (Kelley, Jeff, ‘Introduction’ - ‘essays on the blurring of art and life’ p.xxiv)

In art-like art there still is a boundary and a difference between life and the making of art. ‘Traditional art has always tried to make it good every time, believing, that this was a truer truth than life’ (Kaprow, Allan, ‘the Sixties’ - ‘Happenings in the New York scene’ p.19)

‘The way we are used to see and how we are influenced in our looking’.

Mothlight (1963) is a 16mm film about what a moth might see. Brackhage collected moth wings, other insects and leaves from plants and stick them between two splices of tape; afterwards he brought it to the lab to let it print onto 16mm film. The result is an ongoing stream of the detailed wings and leaves, it looks like a movement that is converted or translated into another movement. The film gives us a completely different approach of seeing.

After reading a couple of texts about this work and seeing ‘Mothlight’ on the internet (youtube.com ‘Mothlight’) the most interesting thing about the work was that it is not about what a moth would see, ‘instead, Mothlight is Brackhage’s imagining of what a moth might see’ (Camper F. ‘Mothlight and beyond’) So by doing this he actually tries to let us, as a viewer, be aware of and reflect on our own way of watching towards the world. In other works from Brackhage the same thing is going on, he tries ‘to imagine seeing through eyes other than his own’ (quoted from Camper, F ‘Mothlight and beyond’) and by that he questions our way of looking.

The same thing occurred to me after reading ‘Secret knowledge’ a book by David Hokney in which Hokney tries to demonstrate the use of lenses in paintings from the 14th century on. ‘This book is in the form of a visual argument’ (quoted from Hokney D. 2006, Secret knowledge rediscovering the techniques of the Old Masters, p.21) It made me conscious about how our ‘seeing’ is influenced by the use of lenses. How our viewing as we once had, has changed into another way of looking nowadays. There is a big difference between a lens-based viewing and the so-called ‘eyeballed’ viewing. Hockney introduces the term eyeballing as a definition of ‘the way artist sits down in front of a sitter and draws or paints a portrait by using his hand and eye alone and nothing else, looking at the figure and then trying to re-create the likeness on the paper or canvas’ (Secret Knowledge 2006, p23). The realisation of our viewing being transformed into a different viewing became very obvious to me in the example Hockney gives us (p.142-143) where he compares a drawing of a field of weath next to Durer’s watercolour ‘Large Turf ‘ (Durer A. Large turf, 1503, Watercolour, pen and inkt) this comparison really is not about demonstrating the use of lenses but just used here to point out the change of our looking. The big difference between a lens-based picture and an eyeballed viewing is that ‘a camera looks through one lens; we look—most of us, at least most of the time—through two eyes’. (Gayford M. 2011, The Mind’s eye)