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Tract11 - 20 March 2008James Geurts Since Turner brought the landscape genre to critical attention over 150 years ago, abstraction has provided a means to link perception, inner states and the physical environment. Tract brings together video artists from Honours, Masters and Doctoral studies in Media Arts who share an interest in this profoundly significant relationship between abstraction and the landscape. The exhibition will configure their work in combinations that draw out synergies and contrasts in their approaches to the tension between inner and outer. |
images
Essays
Tract: James Geurts, Cherie Green, Marcia Jane, Dominic Redfern
"I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown,
for going out, I found, was really going in."1
Since Turner brought the landscape genre to critical attention over 150 years ago, abstraction has provided a means to link perception, inner states and the physical environment. Tract brings together video artists from Honours, Masters and Doctoral studies in Media Arts who share an interest in this profoundly significant relationship between abstraction and the landscape. The exhibition configures their work in combinations that draw out synergies and contrasts in their approaches to the tension between inner and outer.
From proto-modernists like Turner, through Impressionism and the seminal seascapes of Mondrian, landscape was a foundational element of the abstraction project. Whilst abstraction is often misunderstood as a means of confusing that which is being depicted, it is used by many artists as a means of seeing more clearly. Although video based abstraction has found a home in the current explosion of audio-visual performance work, it is yet to be drawn into the fold of the broader video art renaissance that has been going on, and on, since 1995. Perhaps this is a hangover from 1970s early video synthesizer experiments or just an allergic reaction to abstraction in the post-post-modern moment - no textual analysis = no interest. However, despite its absence from galleries, abstract video continues to compel practitioners as a mainstay of experimental screen culture in festivals, clubs and DIY contexts.
Similarly out of vogue just now, the landscape nonetheless remains the great Australian subject. With all our national hand wringing over identity so closely tied to our relationship to the environment, it is a subject both vexing and unavoidable. In the work contained in Tract, understanding identity and understanding place are intrinsically linked as a means to engage critically with what Heidegger described as the 'homelessness' of the modern condition. Collectively this work addresses the 'undifferentiation' of place that the collapse of time, space and culture bring by 're-particularising' through the act of looking closely.
Dominic Redfern
Senior Lecturer in Video Art
Media Arts Studio Coordinator
School of Art
RMIT University
Footnotes:
1 John Muir as quoted in: Way Teale, Edwin (ed.), The wilderness world of John Muir, Mariner Books (Houghton Mifflin) Boston 2001 p. 311
A calm day, sun shining, a bee, car far off; a film-maker stands on the mudflat, his camera on a tripod, bent over a little, as if in a movie himself, the camera open to the shining pools of water, the low redbrown succulents, the greenbrown grass, the greyblue scrub, and the tyre tracks across the spongy ground. The road is palebrown, the sound of the sea faint. He is taking immense time, the air is warm, I hear his feet move on the tiny shells. In a month or two the water will have evaporated and the stench of the rotting reeds and algae in the summer heat will be overwhelming. In the thick low saltbush tiny birds flutter to and fro. There's a plane, one minute sun one minute rain, dark light slowly expands; last purple crosses the swamp, thecloudsfalltothehorizon.
Giving to the land, to give without wanting givingness to be evident; without requiring a giving back; the land gives, in its own time, in its own image.
To be made, oneself, a figure (inasense), because of answering a call, an idea; and, a situation is a spatial 'place' - in terms of a meaning (virtual) or location (manifest). A space has been opened by a livingbeing for/to whom choosing is possible. The situation is ground; a space has come into view by one's beingthere, having founded it (as if) resolutely; it was there without you though; by decision you have seen the situation; and, you are walking away; and, then you are walking back; you are very close now, and now you have gone by, left; a space comes about, to work with.
Landscape, in an old dictionary, is 'a piece of inland scenery'; land is: ground, soil, state, country. One/self is always in the landscape, that's how one is in/of the world, one is landed in the land. Lame, sometimes, for sure, but sure-footed nevertheless, in a landlocked kind of way. The land is a landing, and we enjoy landing, or arriving - coming into to land. Writing is landing, and art is landing; and land is thought. How do we speak land, and 'bring' land expression, outside of and other than itself, when it is not here or there (when it is part of another situation's idea, e.g. art). It come into our sight (but when), in relation to our use (anapparatusofefficacy) of it, our touch of it, our peeling of it into images (what do we think it is/we are, that we want to make something in its name); in other words, when we remove ourself from its view of us. Art transforms the thing (of our interest), writing transforms the thing (of art's interest), writing about the transformation of land into image is almost chemical (the turning of something into something else and then into something else again); a begetting, an act within the createdspaceoferos, a participatory space, where one adds memory to memory, in the desire to extend remembering; this can only be through love and care and intuitive moves, the following of an inner sensation, a quickening, a chance (for begetting to forget, or put aside, 'plan' (or recall, turn, go back)). The land should not be represented (as it is not what it seems). The land when encountered, and this is slow, is a mystery, a universe of 'kinds', an unwieldy poetic, minute, immense, vibratory, unfolding, folding place (always in the midst of re-arrangement, of finish and unfinish, of stalling and surging). We see landscape how we learn to see landscape ('a piece of inland scenery'). Land is un(tran)scriptable; the ambiguity of translation, which is an action, a physical/psychic act, (a mystery that is) more tenuous, more suggestive, more fallable, more sensual (and more affecting). The artoflandwork, if it is 'work', if it thinks of itself as 'work', wants, in the underworld of intention, to be an objectseen, an appearance to appear before. This 'work' is not reasonable, or pragmatic, or didactic; it is work of 'intricacies' and marvels. The land, landscape, 'the world' is not a picture; land is political, its vulnerability is our vulnerability; our looking at it is its looking at us, we are land(scape).
Something always remains - the imprint of the foot, the scent of the skin, the disturbance of the air. The artist could tend the land, by effort, by thought, bynotbeinganartist - and measuring, planting, dreaming. Land, its value or event(fullness), as landscape, as experience, is its pliancy; oneself is eventful too, a scene, rather than from a scene (as if there is a scene to be 'from', and to be taken from, and to be made scenefull; one is a stranger in a strange land, passing through); and one is texture and tempo, and a scenesituation. It's like breathing, this land - but, and this is the dilemma, the work comes back to the gallery. What if the gallery, or something from the gallery, pictures of it for instance, went out to the land; and the artist and the viewer went out too, and conditioned by the journey see/saw the land - a small gesture, or nothing, or the actual doing of the drawing or the filming, or the writingunwriting of this (over time) could eventually come into the gallery (ten years from now); no 'landscape' in the gallery, just the intimation of landthought; the idea that it might exist, that the bones might feel dust, or the mouth taste stones, or the ears hear grass; in effect, no artefacts, only affects (and scraps of memories and hopes); nothing-to-see, except oneself and the other (the performerartistviewer) who says (assoundintime) they have 'seenlandscape'.
Dr. Linda Marie Walker 2008
Senior Lecturer
Louis Laybourne Smith School of Architecture & Design
University of South Australia
Links
Marcia Jane: www.permutations.net
James Geurts: www.jamesgeurts.com
Dominic Redfern: www.dominicredfern.net
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