- Venue
- The Royal Standard
- Location
- North West England
A HYBRIDISED CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE
Misdirect Movies is a touring exhibition that occupied Liverpool’s The Royal Standard during the last half of March. It is a group show featuring a dozen works by seven artists using different media, responding to ideas of digital collage and the impact of technological advances on artistic output and process to produce new forms and received meaning that, as the exhibition text states, “makes us look anew at, and readdress, the familiarity of moving image, media and the cinema space; a hybridised ‘cinematic experience’.”
The exhibition developed from the research and artworks of co-curators Andrew Bracey and John Rimmer, both of whom feature in the exhibition alongside the other artists who respond to and use digital collage and cinematic imagery to explore ideas of narrative and new forms of materiality.
What is presented isn’t just a group show of individual works to be read separately. Instead Bracey and Rimmer present an exhibition as a form of collage itself, with each work responding to and activating differently those placed within the walls of the Royal Standard. The exhibition text quotes Bourriaud’s statement in Postproduction that “an ever increasing number of artworks have been created on the basis of pre-exisiting works, more and more artists interpret, reproduce, re-exhibit, or use works made by others or available cultural products.”
Misdirect Movies exploits such possibilities, mines cinema’s new digital archive and “continues the lineage of collage; to cut up, reposition and (re)arrange cinema’s near endless supply of imagery.”
It is a supply that Bracey’s The Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History of Cinema (2013), epitomises, given, as it is, a montage of thousands of film stills appropriated from the internet, copied, pasted, printed and stuck on the free standing, partition wall that divides the white room at an angle.
It is the first thing one encounters on entering the space. It is busy with colour and images of iconic scenes from famous films featuring familiar faces, interposed with the less known. Memory is triggered by recognition. John Berger’s comments, made 40 years ago, about pin-boards filled with cuttings, photos, drawings, etc being the logical replacement of museums resonates, as, simultaneously, the interplay between the overlapping photos of film stills suggests new relationships between them for the viewer to consider. However, such is their number and mode of display – filling the partition’s boards from top to bottom – that one’s mind barely has time to consider such relationships, being as it is bombarded by a Bruce Lee over there, a Clint Eastwood here, there a Marlon Brando, etcetera, etcetera that the piece becomes one where one’s eye consumes history presented contemporarily, simultaneously, abundantly.
Almost dead centre is a still from Orson Welles’ unfinished Don Quixote, a film which, the text informs, “features a scene where Quixote slashes at a screen in a cinema…(which) acts as a lynchpin for the ideas contained within the curatorial strategy of this exhibition, expanding the notion of Quixotic, intertexturality and the slippage of reality and illusion.” Foucault’s observation of Cervante’s novel, also quoted, explains: “With all the twists and turns, Don Quixote’s adventures form the boundary: they mark the end of the old interplay between resemblance and signs and contain the beginnings of new relations.”
Such a beginning is suggested by the work directly opposite Bracey’s Six Minutes, which is also almost it’s exact opposite in terms of form and content and response to cinema’s near endless supply of imagery.
A flatscreen TV mounted on the wall displays Light Readings: 1500 Cinematic Explosions (2008) by Elizabeth McAlpine. Its title promises much. One stands in front of the flickering white screen waiting for it to deliver, waiting for the screen to erupt into a plethora of climatic, orgasmic combustions. But it doesn’t. It confounds expectation. Instead of fire balls, apocalyptic mushroom clouds, big bangs or even emotional conflagrations, the screen just continues to flicker, white.
It seems to portray, one after the other, the blinding, obliterating white blast of the moment of detonation. It suggests a void, an emptiness, which is underlined by the absence of any soundtrack. It opens questions about the power of images, about their proliferation, as illustrated, opposite by Bracey.
Between these two works are two tables; two glass vitrines with publications inside, opened at specific pages. It’s a different response to the exhibition’s themes, a different media and different artist opening different routes for the viewer to consider. It is Rosa Barber’s Printed Cinema 1-13 (2004-12).
It intervenes in the conversation between Six Minutes and 1500 Cinematic Explosions, vocalising questions regarding the consumption and interpretation of cinema, the media itself, notions of authorship and appropriation, archives, research and the framing of discourse through display.
Inside the vitrine, images and text, and a quote on a red page: “Totally self-maintained by the energy provided by the wall”, returns one to Bracey’s, whose totality of images wrap themselves around the edge of the wall, leading us to the other side, on which a second work by McAlpine’s projected.
This time the title delivers what one expects. Almost. The Film Footage Missed By A Viewer Through Blinking While Watching The Feature Film ‘Don’t Look Now’ (2003). It’s explained by a conversation with someone who knows, rather than any information available to all at the exhibition, that McAlpine recorded someone watching the famous film, then synchronised each blink with the movie.
I wonder. How heavy must the viewer’s eyelids be to blink so slowly? How dry their eyes to blink so frequently?
I blink while watching and see the same scene when my lids re-open. Without knowing the title, the film reads as if being watched on fast-forward – and despite their brevity, the scenes linger too long between sharp cuts and jumps, rather than the strobing effect that such a succession of blinks projected would create, an effect perhaps more akin to that on the TV screen on the far wall showing McAlpine’s Cinematic Explosions.
The arrangement of these four works suggests a narrative in terms of process. With Film Footage Missed… taken as the starting point, McAlpine begins to reduce a film to a series of short, cut up scenes. Bracey takes this a step further, reducing a film to a still image, presented as one amongst a plethora of others. Barba’s piece implies research, discourse, and the dissemination and interpretation of cinema through a different media.
And McAlpine responds with her denouement – the implied obliteration of image through saturation: 1500 Cinematic Explosions – that reveals itself as an eloquent détournement.
And then one turns and looks at the other works in the show – Cathy Lomax’s Film Diary paintings, Dave Griffith’s light box and microfiche, John Rimmer’s painting and corner projection, and, David Reed’s The Searchers, itself almost hidden in a room entered through black curtains – and new connections, new readings, new forms and considerations emerge to twist and turn any conclusions that are already slipping, shifting and reforming.
It is Misdirect Movies after all, and maybe I’ve been misdirected completely.
During the exhibition’s tour, the works will be re-presented in different spaces, differently, and consequentially, different conversations and links between the works will emerge as they activate each other differently. Their particular arrangement then, and inevitable difference of display, will provide another opportunity for different judgements by new juries of viewers to decide upon.
Misdirect Movies opens at the Standpoint Gallery, London on July 5, before continuing to Greyfriars, Lincoln in October, and the Meter Room, Coventry in November.
Cahal Argue, April 2013