23 April – 4 May 2014

Board (1993)

Two figures manipulate a board across a space.

Device (1996)

Six devices enable a figure to move in six directions across the screen.

Three-Legged (1997)

Two figures try to avoid being hit by tennis balls fired from a machine.

______________________

These things happen
Ian White

There is a standard text on John Wood and Paul Harrison’s work. It usually goes something like this:

Abbott & Costello, Bas Jan Ader, Bruce Nauman, Buster Keaton, Carl Andre, Chris Burden, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Edward Lear, Emile Cohl, Fischli & Weiss, Flaubert / Bouvard & Pécuchet, Frank Spencer, Fred Astaire, Gilbert & George, George Melies, Hope & Crosby, J. G. Ballard, Jackson Pollock, Jacques Tati, John Cage, Keystone Cops, Kraftwerk, Laurel & Hardy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Monty Python, Morecamb & Wise, Paul Valéry, Robert Morris, Samuel Beckett / Estragon & Vladimir, Sol LeWitt, Stuart Brisley, Richard Serra, The Odd Couple, Vic Reeves & Bob Mortimer, Wilbur & Orville Wright, Yves Klein, Yvonne Rainer. The everyman deadpan slapstick double-act.

Then there is minimalism, action painting, performance art, comparisons with Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, DIY television shows, a nod towards MDF (their construction material of choice) and the occasional Ta-da! sound effect of a magician revealing a woman sawn in two.There is a difference between ‘artistic intention’ and ‘critical interpretation’ and perhaps this role-call of double-acts and celebrated artists of the 1960’s and ‘70’s, art movements and childhood memories is an extreme example of it. The work of John Wood and Paul Harrison does not take as its subjects the characters of popular comedy, literary duos or art history. Such responses to Wood and Harrison’s videos make clear that there are a number of co-ordinates through which we might read their presentations of (often small) actions and (generally domestic) objects. These co-ordinates reveal as much about the (pop) cultural lexicons of the writers as they do about the work’s actual content. Moreover, this list of antecedents, “influences”, comparisons and analogies is testament to these videos’ immediate plethora of access points. There is a peculiar ease then with which Wood and Harrison’s work lends itself to writing – attested to no less than in the box set born from their multi-video piece Twenty six (drawing and falling things (2001); twenty six separate videos comprised an installation; twenty six letters in the alphabet, so for the publication twenty six writers were asked to respond to one video each, the range and the registers of these texts varying wildly enough to prove a point and corrupt a lexicon while playing in its format.

My point, though, is that these videos are not in and of themselves even about interpretation. So if we can say Wood and Harrison’s videos are like many things, but they are not those things in and of themselves, ‘What are they then?’ becomes the question, which begs a question in turn about whether we should be able to answer the first one.

I am no different to those who have taken a comparative tack to describe this work. As such my own response would start with a comment about Yvonne Rainer – about how her practice as a dancer radically redefined the field. This is exemplified by Rainer’s short dance piece Trio A (first performed 1966), whose minimalist tendencies she famously annotated as the elimination (or minimising) of “illusionism” and “performance”, “monumentality” and the “virtuosic feat”, the “role of the artist’s hand”. Rainer substituted “task or tasklike activity” [sic] for “literalness”, “energy” for “equality” and “‘found’ movement” for “factory fabrication”1. Rainer’s notes could provide the beginning of a reading of Wood and Harrison’s early work Board (1993) in which the two artists move from left to right across the video monitor screen in a choreographed, performative non-performance articulated around a set of orchestrated manoeuvres with a 8’x4’ board. Wood and Harrison’s ‘dance’ across the screen, visually echoes the space of the television set itself, their ‘ordinary’ actions, typically locked-off camera and (only generically) minimal mise-en-scène describing the permutating bisection of this space is like Rainer’s erasure and re- inscription of the proscenium arch theatre.

Assuming some kind of cohesion, this simile very quickly unravels as a useful tool and I would need to start pointing out differences. In Board maybe it is illusionism in fact that informs its minimalist-looking strategies. The space we see is an imaginary echo of the monitor, it is not actually the monitor. One of the artists disappears behind the board which has become a wall to climb over, one of the artists holds the board upright on its shorter edge and lets it drop as the other takes exactly the number of paces in front of it to avoid being hit as the other lets it fall flat, a slam-dunk pun. In favour of the entertainment that variety provides, actions are not repeated. Board is not referencing Rainer but is a controlled commentary on ‘dance’ via anti-”dance” which renders discussing it in Rainer’s terms redundant: a demonstration of all that redefines the functionalism of a non-dramatic prop as a game of possible usage

So, to move from thinking about individual works in Wood and Harrison’s oeuvre in relation to those similar things that inform our responses to them. Perhaps the cue comes from the opportunity that this publication itself provides – to think about the trajectory of their work as it describes itself, rather than discuss single works as accessible cultural amalgams. Board prefiguring the feat of Harry houdini (there’s no escape that I can see) (1994) in its combination of controlled yet basic trickery and definition-bisection of the screen as a contained space. Board as a position that Wood and Harrison’s works move away from, away from physical interaction or exploration of the body in relation to the human-scale object (as in Six boxes (lifesize) (1997), Shaft (1995), Headstand (1995)), towards the body as object in Volunteer (1998) or, even further, the invisible instigation of poles collapsing in the complex Hundredweight (2003): its explosions of colour and repeated, formal engagement of chance as balls fall across a floor, table legs leave traces of random motion, shelves collapse.

Works such as October 97 (1997) or Device (1996), even) that consist of a series of videoed actions, provide a template of how the lexicon of this body of work might be read. That is, they establish sets of rules as a misnomic structure – rules which are in fact unreliable and inconsistent. The works seem to suggest the operations of an internal logic, or formal (and stylistic) unities between separate actions whilst actually toying with the viewer’s expectations of consistency.

October 97 redefines the principle of ‘permutation’ that Board establishes, its thirteen different actions which all seem similar, occurring in a similar space, are in actual fact just that – different: one of the artists is revealed, stood under a fluorescent strip as it flickers on; a mock slide show pastiches Muybridge in real time but shows only an upright artist in the gaps between movements, in stasis but also moving from left to right across the screen in stages. A “free-floating” bright green watering can magically rotates 360° around but away from one of the artists’ head; a roll of paper is held aloft and unfurled to make a rectangle that obscures the person holding it. The person, then, has things done to him and instigates things happening to objects. The parts are equivalent but not the same, they do not provide the stylistic or physical rules of this operation. The final video in the sequence of October 97 makes difference most explicit, reflecting and modifying the sixth document in Six boxes (lifesize). In the final action of Six boxes… one of the artists makes a leap from the back corner of the white cube in an attempt to catch a ball suspended in mid-air. We see this leap through slow motion, then freeze frame: a video-induced suspension like the section in Device when one of the artists is literally suspended by ropes as he is manoeuvred from standing upright on a board into a static dive. Formally different from, though not disconnected to, the static ‘movement’ of the Muybridge pastiche and a pun on Yves Klein surely to be read as if the reference is their content? Maybe, maybe not.

The thirteenth action of October 97 is one of the artists sat on a chair that he is tilting, on the edge of stability, misusing it, about to topple until… another freeze frame and we are denied the conclusion of him falling. Losing the punchline and the art historical reference, we feel the shock of the formal yet naïve (like early pop promos) video trick in direct comparison to the principle of real-time recording that each of the previous actions have established – emphasising not just the difference between this final record and all of the others, but also posing the principle of difference through which we read what has come before. The body as an equal part and almost as arbitrary as a prop, or an art historical joke, one action as different from the next as a watering can is from a roll of paper. The body not about itself but about a demonstration that these things can happen in this medium, in a state of play: movement, incident, illusion. If there is a joke here then it is one more absurd than pure comedy, one that is already acknowledged by the shot in October 97 that sees nothing happen to the seated artist until an apple falls from the ceiling onto his head: and that this, despite all of their contraptions and set-ups to play against it, to render function through dysfunction or misuse, is a “joke” about gravity, ha, the joke of being alive. Being made aware that we are literally attached to this planet by an invisible force is both hysterically mundane and an irrefutable principle made perverse in showing itself, being repeatedly observed. Gravity is absurd.

No wonder then that Wood and Harrison cannot help but also repeatedly turn themselves, or one turn the other, upside-down. No wonder then that this is developed through the body of their work as it intersects with the repeated appearance of an actual or abstract boat. Upside-down. It occurs literally in Six boxes (lifesize) (one of the artists is swung in a quarter-circle across the ceiling of a box and then lowered vertically, head first; October 97 (strapped to a horizontal pole, one of the artists is turned from face-up to face-down); Headstand (like a magic trick in which we see everything, a vertical box containing one of the artists is hinged, flipped over in halves so the artist is manoeuvred from standing to standing on his head); Twenty six: Boat 2 (one of the artists is seen first sat upright, strapped into an adapted, white, stylised boat and turned upside-down and then second is seen climbing out of the hull as the boat repeats its turn). In Volunteer one of the artists is lowered into an increasingly narrow shaft inside a box, head first, echoed in Twenty six: Lifejacket as one of them slides down a diagonal shaft and is halted, stuck there by his inflating lifejacket. There are more instances than this list, not to mention those times when the camera itself is turned upside-down, obviously in Upside down (1998), illusionistically in Harry houdini…, more discreetly in shooting the whole of Hundredweight from above.

In Boat (1995) both artists are seen inside a ‘D’-shaped box, like an abstracted hull in cross-section, the same shape that figures in Device (the same shape as a miniature solid that we see them balancing on in Twenty six…Semi-Circle and they rock and rock until the shape reaches its extreme position, like a fairground ride. A cut (another unity gone) and the hull falls from its curved to its flat side. In part this ‘D’-shape performs geometry, the length of its curve exactly the length of the floor of the box which contains it and which it is designed to perfectly traverse and occupy. But it is also exemplary in describing an alternate set of conditions, an induced disorientation which replaces the simple demonstration of gravity with a complex one that is equally funny, ridiculous and revealing of the nature of things, action and laws. It is like the world and its objects playing themselves out on an unpredictable ocean, in fact if we imagine the world in which Wood and Harrison’s actions occur not to be on land at all, but to be all at sea, in the bowels of a ship, on an on-deck platform, the peculiar panic of it making sense starts to occur. As such, this turning upside-down, this being all at sea is a metaphor that I tentatively extend to the work as whole. Precisely, it is a demonstration of the point at which motion induced by physical action takes over from its instigation, turns the tables, subjecting the perpetrators to the effect of physical movement which they began but have no control over. Maybe it is more like induced weightlessness, like the image of the two artists wobbling around on office chairs inside the back of a van which we never see in Twenty six…’/’Luton.

Regardless, after all this, something basic feels revealed by Wood and Harrison’s irregular patterns of inexhaustible, developed and developing engagement. Curiously, meaning accumulates but is not imposed, not in terms of intention, or application, not the system of a formalist lexicon but a basic law that is also unnameable, manifested through complex (brilliantly stupid) interaction, against the fog of normative usage, through the scrutiny and re-presentation, even, of the normal, the everyday – studied, isolated, plucked – phrased even: action and inaction, cause and effect, body and object. Life, huh. Like I say, these things happen.

1. Yvonne Rainer, ‘A Quasi Survey of Some “Minimalist” Tendencies in the Quantatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A’, first published Gregory Battock, Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York, E. P. Dutton, 1968), reproduced with an introduction in Yvonne Rainer, A Woman Who… (Baltimore & London, John Hopkins University Press, 1999). 

Ian White, ‘These things happen’ published in 124 Minutes, Ffotogallery, 2006

7 – 13 April 2014

The Nine Muses (2010)

Homer’s The Odyssey, the primary narrative reference point for The Nine Muses, begins twenty-five years after the end of the Trojan War. Odysseus still has not returned home, so his son, Telemachus, sets off on a journey in search of his lost father.

Structured as an allegorical fable set between 1949 and 1970, The Nine Muses is comprised of nine overlapping musical chapters that mix archival material with original scenes. Together, they form a stylized retelling of the history of mass migration to post-war Britain through the suggestive lens of the Homeric epic – ‘stories usually seen through the lens of post-colonialism could as easily be viewed through the lens of mythic history’.

Alongside Homer’s epic, The Nine Muses, calls upon the writings of a wide range of authors including Dante Alighieri, Samuel Beckett, Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, John Milton, Friedrich Nietzsche, William Shakespeare, Sophocles, Dylan Thomas, Matsuo Basho, TS Eliot, Li Po, and Rabindranath Tagore.

___________________________________________

“I’ve been obsessed for a long time with something I read in Derek Walcott’s Omeros, where he talks about diasporic lives being characterised by an absence of ruins. There are no monuments that even as ruins attest to your existence, of your passing through a space. This then means that the intangibles, be they sound or words, become necessary building blocks. Lives that are not legitimised in the official monument can then be given a certain kind of legitimacy.

That’s very important in The Nine Muses. The very construction of it is about trying to say something of the migrant narrative. It’s not a completely foreign thing brought over and it’s not just from Britain, it’s an amalgam of these two things. And I wanted the soundtrack, broadly put, to mirror that. By that I mean not simply the “music” but also the words; the cadences and rhythm of words and exactly what sorts of words are seen to coexist with the music.”

-John Akomfrah

(From: http://www.soundandmusic.org/features/sound-film/interview-john-akomfrah)

“The Hyphen, Black-Britishness…”

For Akomfrah, using multiple voices rather than one narrator is part of his commitment to allegory, which is also informed by music and intertwined with a blues aesthetic, “in the sense that none of it is on the note, none of it is on the beat, but you kind of garner from it what’s going on. It’s that thing of just not hitting anything straight.”

Using this allegorical method, Akomfrah works towards destabilising received histories about how “the hyphen, Black-Britishness, was created”. And he identifies this lack of historical imagination as a symptom of received artistic and representational structures themselves, such as conventional documentaries or traditional forms of composition: “Documentary is exactly like the symphony when Schoenberg and that crowd encountered it… It was completely ossified, formulaic. [It had] this almost fossil-like symphony structure to it: here’s an intro, this is the story of how black people came to Britain, and then it’s rounded off and the story starts. The whole kind of boring, meaningless, slavish attempt at propping up some fiction and myth of Britishness and how Black-Britain became, I’m not interested in that, that is not what we’re doing here.”

(From: http://www.thewire.co.uk/archive/artists/john-akomfrah/john-akomfrah_the-nine-muses)

“What I am more interested in is the notion of the hyphen. How hyphens come about, which seems to me to be much more suggestive, and seems to escape some of the raciological trappings of hybridity. It is those raciological trappings that I can sense you have a certain discomfort with. I do too, but I don’t share it because I don’t believe quite as much in the explanatory power of hybridity as I did maybe twenty years ago…

I’ve turned circles around this notion of the hybrid, ever since the 1980s. If we remove it from the field of identity politics for the moment and apply it to the question of aesthetics, the question of hybridity has been very important for us. It implies that we haven’t necessarily had to swear allegiance, for instance, to the existing set of genres and modes of address and cultural practices which were available to us. People would endlessly ask me, do you make art or cinema? Are you doing documentaries or feature films? Where is the place of the historical in these works, which clearly flirt with notions of historicity, but which also seamlessly attempt to weave them with fictional scenarios?

I would routinely say that we have a kind of agnostic relationship to a number of these genres. I can’t swear full allegiance, let’s say, to the documentary because most of the documentaries in their origins—because the modes of address that they set up—have not been flattering to people of African descent. I have no reason, unlike some of my European counterparts, to feel that the history of the documentary is one that I feel kinship with. We all know and we’ve all talked over the years about the racism of some of the early founders, D.W. Griffiths and so on. My point is this: since the history of the forms that I work with are already “contaminated”, an appeal to the hybrid becomes both the defining gesture as well as the conditions of existence of one’s engagement with those forms. One of the ways in which one tries to see through the impasse is by working with what used to be called a “recombinant aesthetic”, whereby every element from these available narratives and genres was drawn upon, without swearing wholesale allegiance to them.

Now it seems to me that in that sort of context, the notion of hybridity does have a use because it connotes a certain descriptive accuracy when it is applied. My problem with it is when it begins to migrate from that space and into the field of identity, and particularly into the field of identity formation. I disagree with the deploying of hybridity essentially for what Paul Gilroy calls “racialogical purposes”. I don’t want to completely let go of the notion of the hybrid, I just want to limit the areas of its use and the values that one ascribes to it.

The reason why I say that I am much more interested in the hyphen is also because it poses cultural and intellectual challenges for me that I am trying to get my head around. Take, for instance, the notion of the “afropolitan”. The notion of the afropolitan has exactly the same sort of problems that hybridity had before. As a descriptive category, the afropolitain is trying to understand patterns of traffic, both cultural and identitarian, across the world. It is trying to find a way of discussing and understanding how someone such as David Adjaye might come about: someone born in Ghana, raised in Dar es Salaam, and who works in Europe, et cetera. We have to find ways of describing these identities without then setting up a hierarchy in which they appear to be more civilized, more “advanced” than the so-called “common” African who hasn’t had the experience of living in Dar es Salaam and/or other places. I can understand the ethical dimension to the problems we have but I don’t want to put the cart before the horse. Both terms are trying to understand patterns across the post-World War planet and we need to turn our attentions to how to do that without them becoming the problem that you are describing.”

-John Akomfrah

(From: http://www.manifestajournal.org/issues/futures-cohabitation-0#page-issuesfuturescohabitationraimigbadamositalksjohnakomfrah)

T. S. Eliot –  Journey of The Magi

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

John Milton – Paradise Lost: Book I (extract)

Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the heav’ns and earth
Rose out of Chaos; or if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flow’d
Fast by the oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’ Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.
And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples th’ upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for thou know’st; thou from the first
Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,
Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad’st it pregnant: what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support,
That to the highth of this great argument
I may assert Eternal Providence
And justify the ways of God to men.

Rabindranath Tagore – My Friend

Art thou abroad on this stormy night
on thy journey of love, my friend?
The sky groans like one in despair.

I have no sleep tonight.
Ever and again I open my door and look out on
the darkness, my friend!

I can see nothing before me.
I wonder where lies thy path!
By what dim shore of the ink-black river,
by what far edge of the frowning forest,
through what mazy depth of gloom art thou threading
thy course to come to me, my friend?