Watching Lou Reed’s BERLIN – a film by Julian Schnabel (2007), I’m reminded of a comment by Robert Hughes as quoted in David Markson’s this is not a novel:
“There are so few people who know how to make art.
– Julian Schnabel.
One less than he thinks. – Robert Hughes”
Rather than classic concert films such as Jonathon Demme and Talking Head’s Stop Making Sense (1984) and D A Pennebaker’s Ziggy Stardust (1983).
Whilst the 1973-74 16mm film Cubic Limit is an exquisite summary of Mohr’s practice, it was not until twenty years later that he fully incorporated moving image into his practice. In 2000, Mohr introduced colour and animation to give fuller expression to the incredible richness of the multiple, complex variations of multi-dimensional cubes
“Since the beginning of my computer related work, the character of motion was always inherent, but I was not too eager to show a development of the signs in time. The visual processes were mostly presented in series, or so to speak in a step by step development where one can go visually forward and backward in his or her time to freely contemplate each sign. Each sign is an instant of the program… Only around the year 2000, I realized that the complexity of my work rose to a point, that I could not communicate to the viewer this content in an easy visual way. I decided to render this development of signs (images) in a real time movement on flat screens to visualize this complexity in a specific and adequate way… I think I succeeded, because the viewer suddenly could “feel” (through the movement from instant to instant) the complex structure even though he or she does not really understand it. The colors in these moving images are there to facilitate this process, and should only be seen as distinctions to show forms and relations. The colors are always chosen randomly by the program.”
Courtesy Bitforms Gallery, New York
Mohr’s moving-image pieces are not video works with a finite duration. The images are generated in real-time from the algorithms programmed by Mohr, the digital image doesn’t run on a loop: it could go on for ever, never repeating itself.
“I like to show the screen with the moving images (calculated in real time), together with the computer standing on the floor like a partner in crime, as “one work”. My new work (2011), however, does not use a PC but a Mac Mini, which I built behind the screen, and is therefore not visible anymore. I can accept this possibility too! … The screen could be seen as a modern canvas!”
“It shouldn’t be called Computer Art in the first place, There’s confusion between how something is produced and what you show. Nobody says: ‘he’s a pencil artist’ because he makes only drawings. I always laughed when people asked if it was art. What else is it? It’s what I do… It’s either art and it’s interesting or it’s nothing.”
“One day in the sixties I read books by a German philosopher called Max Bense. The second law of thermodynamics is that an order over time dissolves into a random nothing, into chaos. Bense thought in art we should do it the other way around; we can start with chaos and go to order.”
“All my relations to aesthetical decisions always go back to musical thinking, either active in that I played a musical instrument or theoretical in that I see my art as visual music… I was very impressed by Anton Webern’s music from the 1920s where for the first time I realized that space, the pause, became as important to the musical construct as the sound itself. So there are these two poles, one and zero.”
“At the very early stages, people thought that maybe when you make a computer drawing you should also show the programme next to it or you should have all-sorts of explanations, but in the end that’s not the point because the visual result is the only thing which counts and it’s not really important how something was made.”
Thanks to Gareth Evans, I recently came across Chris Petit’s reflections on and responses to the digital revolution and its impact on the way we experience the world and art – the explosion of the image bank, fragmentation, flattening and ubiquity, memory, experience and attention, the rise of sampling, recycling and post-production.
“The Museum of Loneliness (MoL) was founded a couple of years ago as a non-institution dedicated to working in the gaps, and positioned at the opposite end of dot com. No website, no facebook, no twitter, MoL is essentially a parasite working through other bodies. It is not particularly lonely either, in case you were wondering. The loneliness refers to its founding observation that modern life’s primary relationship is no longer human but with the screen – actual and psychological – making everywhere connected and unconnected, lonely and not lonely at the same time.
When the digital revolution exploded the image bank, it placed us in a state of what could be called post-cinema. Cinema, like popular music, used to be something to be kept up with but everything has fragmented and flattened out, leaving it both more accessible than ever and at the same time – given the impossible, proliferating backlog – unknowable. Hence the fashion for specialisation and the growing prominence of the curator: those experts and brokers of taste, which remains the misguided be-all and end-all…”
The full article can be read here.
And there’s a related interview – We Are Analogue – with Chris and Rachel Bowles for The Skinny at the 2014 Glasgow Film Festival:
“The Skinny: What is post-cinema how does it relate to the Museum of Loneliness? How did the idea come about?
Chris Petit: With the technological revolution that’s been going on over the last 15 years, the whole image bank has exploded. We’ve moved into a different kind of way of thinking about visual images, it’s a kind of second stage, and there are two parallel movements. There is one that breaks images down into fragments like YouTube and then there are these marathon events from the art world where everything is made incredibly long, like Christian Marclay’s exhibition, The Clock, which was a 24 hour montage film set to real time. As far as the Museum of Loneliness is concerned, it’s kind of a conceit, it is not a real thing. It’s founded on the principle that today our primary relationship is with the screen, it’s not really with each other anymore, it’s with different kinds of screens; both the psychological screen and the real screen of the computer screen. Somewhere in all of that comes the idea of post-cinema. The other phenomenon that is happening now is the progression to the next stage: the idea of cinema’s memory. It is how cinema is remembered. What certain writers have been pointing out for quite a long time is that you don’t remember films in the way that you see them, you only remember fragments. These fragments build up into what could be called cinema’s memory. So somewhere within that the concept of post-cinema lies. I would say it was, it is, more an idea than a theory…”
The full interview can be read here.
A fragment from a lecture Chris delivered as an introduction to his work Lee Harvey Oswald’s Last Dream at the 2014 Oberhausen Film Festival:
“This is not about that fashionable subject, death of cinema, but is about the ‘after’ of something, a shift which is probably too early to identify yet, other than by hairline cracks. I am curious to know exactly when cinema as I understood it ended. Because something has passed, not only in the obvious transitions from film to tape and from analogue to digital. There’s a more personal history…’
