Re:
surfacing by Tim Dallett
The
following comments are based in part on my experience working with Barbara
Sternberg and Rae Davis on their collaborative exhibition pulse.scan.fold., presented at
Gallery 101 in
My
first exposure, in the early nineties, to Sternberg's work, did a great deal to
shape my awareness of film as a visual medium. I was particularly impressed by
what I took to be the visual ethic underlying her approach. As a viewer who had
no formal film training, but who had studied as a painter and designer, I was
drawn to her films as examples of a process of working on the film image as a
visual artifact. Her work seemed to directly address the film image as a
material surface, and to resonate with a profound sense of freedom in the
temporal organization of image relationships.
Her
very real achievement in films like Through
and Through, and more recently, midst,
has been to construct a highly original statement about the equivalence of
images. Through progressions and juxtapositions of landscapes, people and
memories, both abstract and concrete, Sternberg reflects on the nature of
perception and explores its relationship to film as a medium intrinsically in
motion. Images in her films are given a sense of reality and urgency by
specific strategies of repetition, layering and transformation, yet their
reality is always conditioned by the rhythmic flux in which they are embedded.
The notion of image-rhythm, of a basic unit of visual pulsing which organizes a
progression of diverse, yet interrelated imagery, seems to play an essential
and vital role in her work.
The
sense of rhythm as the basis for her films' composition seems to situate its
aesthetic centre somewhere outside the visual itself. At a significant remove
both from artistic traditions based on static formal "quality," and
from the perceptual principles of monocular perspective, Sternberg's work on
rhythm liberates image from the legacy of visual composition as a determining
or confining frame through which movement is forced to pass. Images of all
kinds—recognizable, abstract or associative—maintain their dignity and
fascination as sensuous objects without the sense of being subordinated to
either static compositions or narrative exigencies. Her rendering of the visual
as an expression of abstract, yet somatically concrete temporal rhythms, defers
and delays meaning, yet ultimately empowers viewing, making images available
for interpretation by the viewer in ways which are simultaneously personal,
flexible and respectful of autonomy.
This
space of autonomy enables the viewer to construct his or her own sites of
meaning — perceptual landscapes assembled and unfolded over the time of the
film. The positioning of this viewer as observer-builder has several spatial
implications. Some of these implications relate to the viewer's access to
optical space within the projected image. Through movement, transformation and
fracture of objects in the film-plane, paradoxes of looking into flatness and
onto depth are advanced, worked over and held up for scrutiny, only to be
dissolved and replaced by another cycle of rhythms. A further aspect of the
films' spatial implications for the viewer is the interdependence of temporal
and spatial sensations. These affect perception—as embodiment—over and beyond
an apprehension of complex spaces within the film image itself. Embodied
perception is stimulated not only by the manipulation of visual space on
screen, but by the rhythms through which Sternberg's films orchestrate that space's
evolution over time.
In
a different context, spatial features of her films intersect with an abstract
notion that as a medium, film is situated on a continuum between site
dependence and site independence. An example of independence from site is found
in the ideal concept of the exhibition print, a particle circulating freely and
fluidly between an arbitrary series of viewing situations. At the other end of
this imaginary continuum is a scene of radical contextualism
bearing on all aspects of the projection scenario, from screen reflectance to
room acoustics to program length. In such a setting, conceptual, experiential
and technical factors influence the presentation of film in different ways than
they do in a straightforward screening. Standard 16mm projectors offer no
practical way to repeat a projection without interruption, nor
to alter its duration. Continuous or repeated projection calls for varying
degrees of mechanical modification, supervision, and maintenance. The general
evacuation of tactile-technical competence from daily life and social contexts
further reinforces a widespread (but not entirely universal) reluctance on the
part of arts administrators and curators to accommodate film in
gallery contexts. These factors — further overshadowed by cultural rhetorics concerning the anachronistic materiality of
celluloid itself—articulate a particular kind of tension between a film and the
varying spaces of its appearance.
Yet
the flexible temporal and material logic of Sternberg's work makes possible a
reading of it as a sequence of images, a vast archive of visual material which
has definite organizing principles, but no controlling script. Already the
films' sense of the fragment, their sense of the working up of units of
image-movement into rhythmic blocks suggests the idea of spatializing
these blocks, of deploying them in varying ways on the continuum of film-site
relationships described above. As an object that might exist in the world, how
could one consider the image itself, the film projection, as a spatial event?
Beyond the banal metaphor of the projected image as a "window" into
an "alternative world," what are the possible spatial consequences of
projection as a temporal event which interrupts or inflects the spatial reality
around it?
In my conversations with Barbara Sternberg leading up to the
presentation of pulse.scan.fold. at Gallery 101, we
returned frequently to this idea of a continuum of film-site relationships and
how it could relate to a presentation of her practice as a process. How could
the exhibition both make evident the character of process found in the film
work itself, and explore other aspects of Sternberg's aesthetic in ways which
would work with, rather than struggle against, the spatial frame of the
gallery? In parallel to Rae Davis's re-structuring of the relationship of the
gallery's rooms as an eloquent dialectic of siting
and seeing, Sternberg's contribution to the pulse.scan.fold. installation
could be thought of as an unfolding of her film practice in space, an
application of her image-making and image-assembling processes to the space of
a room rather than to the film frame.
The
exhibition was conceived around the use of a darkened larger gallery
accommodating a number of media installations and regularly scheduled
projections of Sternberg's films over a three week period. This space was
linked and juxtaposed with a smaller, brightly lit gallery where Rae Davis's
paper works could be viewed both directly, and from a number of different
angles through a tapered viewing slot conceived by
Freely
excising short elements from various films, Sternberg transformed them into
mini-installations using continuous video playback on two intimate viewing
stations with chairs and headphones. At these stations, one could approach a
cinematic fragment in a different way than one would if watching it in a
longer, continuously evolving film, in a distinctive combination of the
familiar, shared viewing situation of the TV set and the private, contemplative
listening space of the headphone-bubble. In another part of the gallery, and at
a larger scale, a continuously repeated sequence, taken from Beating, showed waves advancing and
receding. This was projected as a large-scale video image which acted as a link
with Rae Davis' nearby components of the installation. Still other spatial
translations of Sternberg's films took the form of individual 16mm frames
enlarged and rendered as computer processed still photographs, and a slide projection
with an accompanying text. As a pendant to, and at the opposite end of the
gallery from Davis's folded paper works, pages of Sternberg's script-drawings,
palimpsests of notations and sketches, were laminated to a wall, behind the
surface on which her films were projected.
The
ensemble of these "fragments" seemed to invoke the sense of a number
of simultaneous ethical and experiential scenarios articulated, both gently and
passionately, through visual gesture and auditory repetition. The multiplication
of access points—standing, walking, watching a film, casting a shadow in front
of a video image, sitting with others to see and hear up close moved
Sternberg's filmic elements away from their usual context of directional
film-flow, into a space of tangential and multi-valent
address. In pulse.scan.fold
concepts of rhythm, flow, opacity, transparency and depth in Sternberg's work
found new and different means of expression, both through the media
environments just described, and in relation to the echoes and metaphoric
linkages set into motion by the textures and careful placement of Rae Davis's
paper constructions.
Davis
and Sternberg have continued their work together, building on pulse.scan.fold
to develop Surge, an installation
exhibited at the Art Gallery of Windsor in 1998 and at Galerie
Articule in
Notes
(1)
Barbara Godard, "Theatres of Perception: The Filmworks of Barbara Sternberg and the Paperworks
of Rae Davis," in Tim Dallett, ed.,
Image/Duration: Installations of the Moving Image (Ottawa: Gallery 101, 1999),
pp. 47-79
(2) Barbara Sternberg and Rae Davis, "Surge", artists'
statement, 1998.