I see a darkness: light and its lack.

A Journey up to London to see Gerhard Richter at the Tate and Building the Revolution at the Royal Academy. I had forgotten that Tacita Dean’s piece Film, was the latest Installation for The Turbine Hall, and as such I was unprepared for the dark shadow that the installation casts into the hall. As you walk into the building you are met by a distinct lack of light, Film’s distant gloaming summoning you down, deeper into the darkness. Like the secular light of an avant-garde Cathedral window the strip of enlarged Film hangs in the night which lurks at the end of the Turbine Hall.

As I watched the eleven-minute loop, looping, I felt myself succumb to its soporific lull, staring through the images into my own thinking. The echo of intermittent footsteps as people approached and moved away became a soundtrack assisting my drift. Although slightly disturbed by the stationary sprockets, which add a frame of pretense to the reality of the film, I sat here silently watching time passing me by: ‘waiting without waiting for’.

I must confess that I am partial to watching nothing happen, especially when it doesn’t happen very slowly. In 2001 Dean’s show at Tate Britain allowed me to sit on the melancholic carousal of Berlin’s Fernsehturm television tower: I sat there for several rotations, listening to the ticking chronometer of the 16mm projector with occasional accompaniment from the man on the Fernsehturm’s organ (this all does sound unintentionally seaside).

The grey melancholy of Gerhard Richter’s Baader Meinhof room added to the gloomy pall falling over the day (in an act of unintentional irony, every room in the Richter exhibition had  a sign saying Photography is strictly forbidden) . At the RA’s Building the Revolution I discovered Gustav Klutsis’s Design for Loudspeaker No. 7 and the sublime squares, lines and circles of Rodchenko, Malevich, and Lisitsky (forms also found in Tacita Dean’s Film). But even these transcendent ‘archetonics’ had a shadow cast over them, when seen in the photographic company of the architecture they inspired. Beautiful forms, flowing with function, left to crumble and rot; one of the remaining ‘palaces’ now with its insides ripped out as it was transformed into the foyer of a bank.

Today I found comfort in the discovery of Arthur Zajonc’s book Catching the Light, which was waiting for me on the Oxfam shelf. A ‘multi-levelled history’ of light, the first few pages reveal light itself to be darkness. Zajonc conducted an experiment in which he created a ‘region of space’ (a box) filled only with light: a space in which ‘light does not illuminate any interior objects or surfaces’. What does he see when he looks into light alone: “Absolute darkness! I see nothing but the blackness of empty space […] The space is clearly not empty but filled with light. Yet without an object on which the light can fall, one sees only darkness.’ Following a discussion with the Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart, Zajonc realised that even the outer space in which our planet floats, the darkness of light is omnipotent: ‘The sun’s light, although present everywhere, fell on nothing and so nothing was seen. Only darkness.’

I see a darkness indeed.

four recent deaths

‘Serendipity: making discoveries by accident and sagacity, of things we are not in quest of’.

After discovering a large amount of flies dying or approaching death at the Frieze Art Fair, I had not given their demise another thought. But on Friday, I rolled open a blind in a room at work (appropriately numbered 101) and there discovered a quiet holocaust: a windowsill landscape of dead flies. Most of the flies were dead on their backs, but others seemed to have just fallen over, whilst one was in a strangely erect position, as if addressing the other members of the necropolis. There was definitely something of the Pompeii in the flies’ deathly arrangement. One fly occasionally moved a leg, whilst the remaining extant fly, wandered around on a sky, cruelly visible through the glass pane of the window.

Exposing a rather Warholian disposition, I went to get my camera, so that I might visually seize the poor flies in their moribund tableaux.
I read a story once that, when Andy was informed one of his ‘friends’ had just leapt from a building to his death, Andy replied, “I wish he had told me, I could have taken my camera and filmed him”. Which may appear heartless and cruel, but then again if the call had been made and Andy and his Bolex arrived, then this sad anonymous exit may have been remembered; a life disappeared, would be framed and possibly immortalised through the 16mm lens of Andy’s ‘ocular vampirism’.
Not that I would claim to be immortalising the brief lives of these poor flies. No, there is just something very sad in the quiet recent death that hides behind the closed blind of a window.

art kills: flies

The Frieze Art Fair does not only attract, artists, students, the worlds galletaria and Michael Stipe.
Flies seem also drawn to the contemporary art world. As you wander further behind the tent flaps of contemporary art, the number of flies grows, the white walled cubes turning into airports not only for dust but for Musca domestica. Unfortunately this rendezvous with art seems fatal to the regurgitating flaneur, more and more flies lying dead beneath the artworks. The cause of death could be critical exhaustion or intellectual starvation or perhaps they have died of pleasure, as they have sucumbed to the sublime. I photographed the sad unnoticed litter of their corporeal ghost.

One fly, photographed prior to exit, sat staring out at the horizon of being, considering existence and if art has a purpose beyond investment and the occasional takeaway from a rotting potatoe.

Interval for two

I’m currently working on soundscapes for the opening event of 10 Days Across the City festival, at the Royal Theatre, Winchester. I had a tour of backstage and even better, understage: this is the view from the orchestra pit. Spatz (the theatre’s chief technician) lowered all the stays that normally suspend lights and scenery over the stage and I attached contact microphones and ‘played’ them by rattling them and setting up gentle swinging patterns.  I used the sounds captured to create a short metallic interval that will interrupt the two soundscapes broadcast into the auditorium on the evening of Halloween.