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| Hilary lloyd Turner Prize @ Baltic 2011 |
Its saturday 14th January 2012...its taken me this long to get my act together and write something. That is Im not short of writting anything just haven't got round to it!! So here I am again and whats new?? well since my last posting I have submitted all modules, SE Creative Thinking 16th.12.2011 and AT Contemporary Influences 3.1.2012. Im yet to hear feedback...in particular SE as it is research developing towards the DDP. I think Im online with SE this thursday 19th?? shall just check that now whilist Im thinking about it....yes Im right @ 2:30. Thats good as I will be missing mornings session as elsewhere (must email stuart to confirm) I can discuss with him then last module submission leading into new module. ok whats next??
oh yes before christmas I was talking to a colleague about my filming and what is was
very briefly about...this whole subject about 'nothing'. She mentioned referring to The Turner Prize @ Baltic that Matthew Collins had spoken about Hilary Lloyds video installations...(I haven't been able to find that review unfortunatly??). Since that conversation i have carried out some research on her work, which interestingly refers to Warhols time based media...
extract taken from
http://www.channel4.com/news/turner-prize-2011-hilary-lloyd
Working in film and video, Hilary Lloyd presents sound and image to the viewer in a way which challenges and undermines viewing conventions, writes Matthew Cain.
Hilary Lloyd was born in Halifax, Yorkshire, in 1964. She studied at Newcastle Polytechnic and now lives and works in London.
She was nominated for the
Turner Prize 2011 for her solo show at Raven Row in London.
Lloyd works in the perennially-fashionable film and video although unlike most other artists she draws attention to the projection process, almost making the technical equipment a sculptural medium in itself.
In some cases, these projectors can obstruct the viewing process and much of her moving images themselves toy with our viewing conventions. So while one piece in this show contains barely perceptible movement, which is at first puzzling, the neighboring work is made up of a constant flickering energy on a fragmented screen.
In another, Floor 2011, the floor represented is abstracted to a disorientating degree.
Our desire for an image that is easy to read is thwarted but replaced, at least in my case, with delight at the artist's sense of mischief.
Hilary Lloyd talking about her films in which she says 'It's not always clear what I filmed',
Looking abit deeper I found her work in a catalogue: Intellegence - New British Art 2000, weirdly enough sitting on my shelf...what was interesting was (p69) I quote..'using techniques established by Andy Warhol such as the fixed, deadpan camera, lloyd elicits performances that reveal both the pleasure and the discomfort of being observed...
Polly Staple (p69) sums up the relationship between viewer and the subject in Lloyds work:
'Lloyds videos articulate the engagement between the voyer and the performer, between watching and being watched, intimacy and distance, wilfulness and self control. this high degree of self-consciousness seems a particularly urban trait, it stems from moving - flaneuring-through the city, and articulates the paradoxical relationship between the desire to connect and the need to proect yourself'...
(Polly Staple 'precious time: Polly staple on Hilary Lloyd' Untitled, spring 2000, p9)
I took a trip up to the Baltic (Thursday 29th December 2011) to visit the Turner Prize, specifically to see Lloyds work which i have to say was good to see, for me the film wasn't particuarly interesting? what has been written about it is more so...what was enlighting was to see the mechanics of the video/filming equipment forming a wall between you and the subject, it all seems part of the installation, that is, it is not just about the film, but what projects it??
Further reading Michael Newman (which I found in the TP catalogue)...has led me on to think about the function or purpose of the camera.
http://artistsspace.org/aspace/wp-content/files_mf/hilarylloydbookletweb3427.pdf An extract from this book is of particular use:
Lloyd’s installations combine the duration of this kind of experience – now directed not towards an abstract object but to the projection equipment itself – with the experience of the time of the image. The virtual time of the image is folded back onto the object, facilitated by characteristics they both share, which involve both a common allure and a structure of repetition rendered potentially endless by the loop. In the process, the appeal of each dimension is transferred onto the other, so that the image becomes abstractly autonomous, while the equipment takes on sex-appeal. (That this is exactly how advertising works, and that the advertising industry was accelerating at the time of Minimalism, is probably no coincidence.) Effectively, object becomes image, and image thing.
To demonstrate that the very set-up of the situations of filming and projection reinforce the ideology conveyed by cinematic representation was the burden of so-called “apparatus theory” in the 1970s, which followed avant-garde developments in cinema, such as Jean-Luc Godard’s deconstruction of the cinematic image through the use of montage with text on the screen. Theorists including Jean-Louis Baudry argued that cinema worked through identifications not only with characters in the movies, but also with the position of the camera, reproduced in the projector hidden high up behind the heads of the audience in the dark movie house So the viewer is simultaneously implicated in the narrative of the film, and enabled to take a “transcendental” position removed from the interaction of bodies though the all-seeing camera. The critical idea of the 1970s was that to make explicit the structure and effects of the apparatus would be to demystify the ideological operations of cinema, which was up to that time the dominant mode of the mass-consumption of moving images. The problems inherent in this idea became clear when artists started presenting the projection apparatus itself in their installations. On the one hand, to place a projector – whether film, slide, or video – in the gallery space is to foreclose the viewing subject’s fantasy of occupying that position: if it’s there, I can’t be. The viewer is ejected from being the source and vanishing point of the image. This may induce a critical awareness of the way in which images work to position the subject.
The images emerge from and disappear into downward wipes set to different speeds, so that their rhythms converge and diverge. This means that while it is very difficult to calculate the relations between the moments of appearance of the two images, the viewer is somehow compelled, through the very fact of rhythm, to try. This is further complicated by the accompaniment of short, repetitious edits of recorded sound, that repeats, overlapping at times contrapuntally, and at others discordantly. That the visual wipes suggest blinks, but that one could not possibly blink one’s two eyes in the rhythm of the video, implies that the technology of the work creates a peculiar kind of sensation that cannot be contained within the limits of normal perception.
Further, this idea of the blink (visual wipes suggest blinks..eye blinks) connects Lloyd’s earlier works based on still images – those using slide-projection carousels, and the later sequences of ‘still’ images in video projections – with the moving image projections where the blank moments between images – those invisible gaps elided though perceptual delay in the “optical unconscious” of film – have been replaced in more recent works by other rhythmic devices, which bring to the surface the nothingness and disconnectedness that sustains the presence of the image. If the images can become eyes, so can the projectors. The sense of emptiness at Raven Row had nothing to do with the number of visitors in the gallery, but rather with the feeling that the installations were watching themselves; that the projectors were surrogate viewers that not only produced the images, but also regarded them on our behalf.
Im hoping that this research will look to find a possible reasoning to what I am thinking about in my own work..it all seems to be fitting together quite nicely which gives me the belief that Im going in the right direction and it will go eventually full circle that is, it will go back to the start of my learning plan where I was initially addressing the concept of a 'two way act of communication' (refer to bridging module paper)....'At first I was looking at semiotics, i.e. connation and denotation, in specifically theories presented by Barthes and his work on The Photographic Message, 1977 and Stuart Halls work on Representation, 2010, specifically his writings on audience studies. I wanted to look at building a framework that showed how a student’s creative process could be interpreted using parts to make up the whole and visa versa, in order to interpret new understanding and meaning by the observer who participated with the process'.
There definatly seems to be a link forming (i will need to to a RM and figure it out looking at as a whole matter) I research Baudry and managed to get hold of a book from Northumbria library, Narrative Apparatus Ideology. A film theory reader, Philip Rosen. Sounds interesting doesnt it?? I was actually excited about reading it too, however this has proved difficult as its not easy to read. Yes you need to be at a higher level of thinking which unfortunalty for me I am not, its like having to try and break a code, I find I am constantly looking up words I do not understand, or having to break down sentences...arhhhh. I have read part of chapter Ideological effects of the basic cinematic apparatus, Baudry, which is why I had a go, it basically discusses 'objective reality' and the camera. the idea of 'objective reality' and how I understand it is OR (objective reality) is outside the mind i.e. a chair is a chair as seen by all...we know that, but if we think about SR (subjective reality) I personally see the chair as not a chair but perhaps something else....its almost like seeing something new for the first time or even coming across a new word for example, everybody else knows what it is or what it means except you, which should be a good thing because at that point of time you are not part of the OR crowd, its when you know and understand then you become part of the OR and then SR kicks back in (your personal view may still differ even after taken on OR...) does this make sense..hope so.
I shall read this chapter and others and come back to discussion in next posting.
