The relationship between the moving image
and contemporary art has been an uneasy
one since the invention of film in the late
19th century. The defining characteristics
of mainstream film-fictional subject matter,
linear progression, narrative structure
and adherence to conventions of realistic
representation-were diametrically opposed
to the dictate of radical experimentation
in Modernism. Avant-garde films by Laszlo
Moholy-Nagy, Hans Richter and Viktor Ekkeling,
to name only some of the most prominent
protagonists, were by definition limited
in duration, abstract and non-narrative.
Until video became commercially available
in the 1960s, the production and editing
process of film remained expensive, time-intensive
and technologically challenging, conditioning
the survival of these fundamental characteristics.
However, much of experimental film and
video work from the 1960s through the 80s
continued to deliberately negate its technical
possibilities. Shaky camera movements, jumpy
cuts, out-of-focus images, appropriated
material, repetition and seriality contravened
the development of narrative progression
and employed boredom as a central (though
not always premeditated) ritualistic artistic
device. Grainy black and white continued
to be preferable to high-definition colour
as if the true artist had to virtuously
resist the allure of cheap entertainment,
commercial seduction and, above all, the
decadent indulgence in unnecessary excess.
Residues of modernist aesthetics continued
to impact on formal choices as ideological
commitments precluded the use of those aesthetic
modes of expression that might approximate
the work of art too closely to mass-cultural
products.
Continuing rapid technological advancements
over the last decade have made sophisticated,
compact and easy-to-use digital equipment
widely available and freed its application
somewhat from the stigma of aesthetic excess.
The reciprocal infiltration of the worlds
of contemporary art and pop culture has
further led to a more liberal, at times
intense exchange of stylistic idioms.
Clare Langan is at home both in the world
of commercial, big-budget film and the more
rarefied atmosphere of contemporary art.
With a number of other contemporary artists
working, in particular, in video, film but
also photography (Jeff Wall, Doug Aitken
and Chris Cunningham, with Bill Viola as
pioneering father figure), she has overcome
the purist resistance to the seductive gloss
of high-end production and the fallacy that
authenticity of expression is inherently
embedded in modest production values. In
her film installations she continues to
afford the luxury of using the "old-fashioned,"
mechanical medium of film, shooting on 16
mm stock which is then transferred to DVD
and projected. The artist deliberately refrains
from the elaborate manipulation of images
in post-production (except for some careful
editing and overlaying of some additional
sound elements) that today is standard practice
in both commercial as well as experimental
film and video production, relying instead
on the inherent sensuality of film.
In Forty Below, 1999 and Too dark for night,
2001 dramatic landscapes tinged in shades
of aquatic blue-greens and glowing in atmospheric
sand tones are the product of relatively
primitive technology applied on location.
In both films, Langan has experimented
with hand-made filters painted with glass
paint that are placed in front of or inside
the lens. This simple procedure combines
an economical creative technique with the
gesture of artistic integrity, resulting
in stunning scenes of great immediacy that
can easily compete with the latest digitally
manipulated images. Langan practices what
could be defined as "pastoral heroism"-
a reconfigured continuation of the genre
of 19th-century landscape painting into
the 21st century. In it, simplicity of means
coincides with the splendid grandeur of
nature or, as Thomas Crow defined it, the
"incorporation of the commonplace within
the exalted," while the film continuously
asserts its actuality as work of art and
inscribes the presence of the spectator
through a succession of arriving or departing
ghostly figures. [i]
Too dark for night is a post-apocalyptic
Lawrence of Arabia that gives in to the
alluring beauty of decay as nature gradually
claims back territory no longer of use to
humans. Of breathtaking magnificence, the
exotic desert sequence courageously plays
with the comforting Kitsch of National Geographic magazine and quality nature documentaries
popular on public television and the Discovery
Channel. As the dunes move through the doorway
of an abandoned building with its walls
covered in a cloud-like pattern, inside
and outside are perplexingly reversed, recalling
third-generation Surrealist effects popular
in the 1960s and 70s and promulgated in
millions of posters and photo wallpapers.
Rescued from history's rubbish heap of bad
taste, unbearable beauty is given a new
lease of life as visualisation of distant
memories - comforting dreams mitigating unspeakable
loss.
This is, however, no pastoral Technicolor
Eden in the long, particularly American
tradition of special effects landscape painting
by, for example, Albert Bierstadt and the
Hudson River School and its filmic continuation
in Hollywood Westerns of 1950s. While Langan
updates the Cinemascope wide-screen effects
and engulfs the viewer in the contemporary
medium of large-scale video projection,
the ultimately utopian projections of an
idyllic pastoral of these earlier visualisations
of landscape has little justification at
the turn of the 21st century.
The overblown monumentality of the sublime
landscape with its humbling diminution of
human presence here stands in contrast with
Romantic convention of pathetic fallacy
and its direct identification with and emotional
immersion into nature. The rugged ice cliffs
of Forty Below are distant reflections of
Caspar David Friedrich's Romantic icon of
The Ice Sea (1823 / 24) where the extremes
of nature become an allegory of mankind's
hopeless struggle and the inevitability
of one's fate.
The ocular image produced by the manipulated
lenses presents the spectre of a distant
past viewed through the tunnel vision of
memory while, at the same time, Langan draws
attention to the cinematographic origin
of her images and its human perceptual equivalent
in the eye. This stylistic device revives
another Romantic compositional formula used,
amongst others, with great effect by William
Turner in his visionary Light and Colour
(Goethe's Theory) - The Morning After the
Deluge, 1843. The painting's title points
to its origin in scientific and, in particular,
optical studies while the circular composition
asserts the intense corporeality of vision.[ii]
There is nothing more beautiful than a
natural disaster on a monumental scale,
when the grandeur of nature and the frisson
of death observed from afar coincide in
a panoramic catastrophe, arrested in time
for our viewing pleasure. Langan's refrains
from the spectacular fireworks of hurricanes,
volcano eruptions, earthquakes or deluges
and indulges instead in recording the slow
progress of destruction, respectively nature's
reconstruction through its extremes states.
Her landscapes are largely unpopulated
exotic locations, with only a few reminders
of human existence that have remained strangely
intact, as if preserved in some kind of
Pompeiian deep storage. The catastrophe
has already happened and we are confronted
with an apocalyptic aftermath as nature
pushes back the boundaries of human civilisation.
Nature itself knows no destruction but only
an endless cycle of growth and decay. Despite
the gloomy, turbulent mood of eternal change
permeating these film installations, there
is also serenity and peacefulness as nature
asserts its rightful place.
Forty Below concludes with a shadowy figure
emerging from the sea into which it had
previously disappeared. Langan's trilogy
ultimately projects not a dystopian view
of the end of human race through self-annihilation
but the beginning of a process of cleansing
and rebirth, playing on the universal significance
of water as an agent of change and transformation.
[i] Thomas Crow, "The Simple Life: Pastoralism and the Persistence of Genre in Recent Art" in Idem., Modern Art in the Common Culture. New Haven, Connecticut and London: Yale University Press, 1996, p. 176, 201.
[ii] Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 1990, pp. 139-141.
Christoph Grunenberg
Director of Tate Liverpool and former curator at The Institute of Contemporary Art ,Boston.
© Christoph Grunenberg / Clare Langan |
