Following our recent screening of Jean-Paul’s film A Minimal Difference (more about the screening can be found in the Past Screenings section here), we asked Jean-Paul a few questions linked to the work:
You often use found photographic and cinematic material in your work, A Minimal Difference features press images of the barricades from political protests in Bangkok, bodies piled-up after the 2010 Haitian earthquake, furniture from an eviction in Cleveland, and destruction in Gaza. What prompted you to use these particular images and do you see links between them?
My selection of sources, whether found or self-made or self-recorded, is rather intuitive, usually based on subjective sense. Unlike a journalist or an academic, I am not directed by a prescribed code of ethics or peer-review, per se, but can, and must, as an artist, adhere to what is ‘felt’ in forming the logic of the work I make. I think of this ‘sense’ as emerging from and pointing to the ongoing, agitated space between the source photograph (in this case) as a material, inclusive of its symbolic and geopolitical content, that is, as Kantian noumenon, and my experience of it as phenomenon. In my work I am usually ‘working-through’ an understanding of what this is: I am trying to analyse what drives my compulsion to certain photographs or videos or films and part of this investigation comes through making connections between them – content-based, formal, or more idiosyncratic connections – and abstracting those particularities so that I can make sense. It is both a mental and very physical exercise.
The specific photographs used as a source for the gouache and ink cells in A Minimal Difference, when studied, all employ a similar geometric composition; using a more or less central horizon-line and vanishing point that usurps the content of the picture – the people and objects depicted –t o become the subject itself, as such. I am compelled by the use of these visual strategies in the collaboration between photographer and photo-editor and how it lays-bare their processes of construction, selection, delimitation, and dispersion. Through these special compartmentalisations, made visible by the designs of the photographer and their editorial counterpart, the photograph presents as material and an experience of that material – rather than merely an experience of its content. My translation of these editorial choices into another artistic form with graphic lines and colours subjected to optical layering, motion, and durational augmentation exacerbates the artifice of the photograph: the treatment of these receding vistas –o f stone and tire barriers, corpses, furniture, and rubble – attest to the difficult relationship we have with ethics and aesthetics and its tactical, political articulation of the sublime toward catharsis and possible action. In these seemingly endless piles a monumental vastness replaces any sense of singularity – no one log amongst logs, no lone body in the mass grave – but only by surrendering to a constrained position of individual vision. My use of the multi-plane camera and its illusions to the errors of vision is directed by this dialectic.
A Minimal Difference also features more metaphoric pictures, amongst others, a logjam, clouds, and smoke. What prompted you to use these particular images, do you see links between them and with the images taken from the press?
As a counterpoint to the cells that reference photojournalism in conflict zones, these non-indexically sourced sections suggest more amorphous restrictions of vision and movement: like being in a jam or a haze. In this more personal, existential sense they are representative of the continuousness of the dialectic between the material and its experience–like the possible events occurring in the time that passes between wood being cut and burnt into nothingness.
Your use of abstract monotone images – squares, cones, spheres, etc. – often leads to (separate) discussions of Modernism and indexicality. Whilst these discussions are productive (and part of the richness of your work), it seems that you’re also, perhaps primarily, engaged in something akin to detournement, to Brechtian alienation to call us to question modes of representation and the role of the image. Is this correct?
Yes, the abstraction that occurs is two-fold: of course, the artifice of the figurative and representational tableaux is highlighted by the intersecting regular shapes and their colours, but an equal and opposite perspectival shift occurs to the square, circle, rectangle, and triangle, an experiential shift, akin to the parallax errors of the multi-plane camera, where the ethical implications of the original source material – and the sense that brought me to them – infects the shapes. In part, I am seeking to understand how non-objective elements like colour, shape, duration, and sound can hold the ethics, desires, and sense that resonate within real-world document – photojournalism, documentaries, on-line image streams, etc.
Do you hope that viewers will reassess, see afresh the events underlying the source materials?
Viewers will make their own sense from watching the work. To envision a possible reassessment of the source material would not dignify the exciting potentials of artifice and misreading (mine and yours), repeating the error of documentary photojournalism strategies, and those of photo-conceptualism and a great deal of research-based film and video, that often conceal – or worse, expose only to righteously disparage – aesthetic-narrative tactics. I only hope that the experience of seeing A Minimal Difference is a meaningful one.
http://www.jeanpaulkelly.com/
