“Boundaries of Being”
catalogue essay
Dunlop Art
Gallery 1995
January 12
Dear Ingrid
Jenkner,
I just
received your letter and packet, and was very pleased to be considered for your
Critic‑in‑Residence programme with the opportunity it gives me to
curate an exhibition. Here are some initial reactions, background info: though
I am first and foremost a filmmaker, I have organized screenings of
experimental film because I am committed to this type of film practice and
because it has almost no critics/ curators who are not themselves
filmmakers. I do not see myself as a theorist with a
particular line of enquiry, though as a person and as a filmmaker I would say I
have. My curating, therefore, would be informed by my own observing, thinking,
and filming in areas of perception of reality and different ways of
knowing/seeing the world: the body as know‑er; questions of boundaries,
identity, inner/outer; movement between particularity and relatedness; time as
it passes, rhythm, memory; and timelessness, a search for the present,
presence. Many of these are intrinsic to film itself, a medium of light/vision
and time.
" No work of art must be described or explained under the rubric of
communication." T. Adorno
In 1986 I
attended the ANNPAC conference in Vancouver, "Strategies for
Survival". A Polish artist
mentioned in his talk a sense he had in recent work of a return of the
spiritual. That's all I remember of his talk, but that lodged itself away
somewhere in my brain. Later, I
recognized that the effects and significance of certain artworks were not
contained by a description of their issues, formal devices, images or
text. Work less to be 'read' than to be
seen or experienced. I would like to show works that suggest, recall, hint at, give an experience of something larger. (Some things elude
one, if turned to directly.)
"I find that
raising my eyes slightly above what I am regarding so that the thing is a
little out of focus seems to bring the spiritual into clearer vision..."
E.Carr
I also
would like to develop with you a method for presenting a filmmaker's work
within the gallery context. It's an issue I have been pursuing with galleries:
how to integrate film artists into the gallery art world. How to give a
presence to filmwork over the three‑week exhibition period? These are
ideas I could work out there in consultation with you and local filmmakers and
curators, and bring one or another to fruition at least. OK?
Barbara
Sternberg
May 14
Dear
Ingrid,
I am a
little concerned with all the attention of late in the popular media given to
spirituality and death. I'm not concerned that there is attention -
baby-boomer's parents are of an age now where their mortality has become all
too real, and material security and a surfeit of
products has brought questions of what is of value, or at least, what's
next? My concern is with the type of
attention these questions are receiving and the mind-set behind it. What does a
mass gathering of teens in Denver to see the Pope indicate? Is this attending
to soul or a desire for authority, for some semblance of control in an
overwhelming world? What is the rationale behind a TV programme in which the
possibility of an immaculate conception is used as a legal defense to prohibit
an abortion? And the programme that featured the befriending of a space alien
as an example of good old Christmas values - the alien's spaceship was turned
into a lucrative tourist attraction which saved the recession-poor town's
economy. Do films like "Ghost" represent our society's acknowledgement
of death as part of life or are they one more example of our denial and our
desire to control death, master it as we believe we master all else, not accept
the finality, the silence of the grave?
" Cinema must represent, because it is stronger than ever, something that one
does not encroach upon". J L. Godard
"Nothing
can be taken for granted, least of all the conventions of the culture, which
give us our embedded notions of reality. Especially not in an era where words
and their meanings are slowly moving apart, leaving us in a kind of
exile." (Vera Frenkel)
Words have
been used up, their original meanings blurred, diluted, distorted, trivialized
from over‑use and sloganism. Heidegger maintains that poetry can
revitalize words. Poetic images make strange the familiar and so words speak
anew. How can representational media function poetically? The artworks I am
looking for are personal and leave the viewer room to speculate, interact,
experience and wonder.
From
Maureen Turim's Abstraction in the
Avant-Garde, "...they [films] are enclosed in a tension, a struggle
between the generation of force and the articulation of meaning. Operations on
representation evoke the history of figural and narrative art, but these film
images, in their difference from these traditions, expose what is habitually
unseen in the act of seeing."
" As daily bread comes in contact with the mouth, cinema would have to bring
the spectator into closer contact with his deep, everyday existence..."
J.L. Godard
Barbara
June 26
Dear
Ingrid,
I have
thought of a number of possible films which are more or less formal, more or
less socio‑political in content, but all of which could be situated
within a discussion of the 'spiritual'.
I am using this word loosely. I do not intend to look for work that is
about a belief in God. Rather, media works that concern themselves with how we
are as humans in the world, or that allow us to see the world afresh, as if we
were seeing it again for the first time - the mystery that is in the everyday.
Difficult to explain... or maybe that's really it: the ineffable. I saw an Ernie Gehr film that was WONDER ‑ful.
I am thinking about what is beyond words, is not susceptible to those limits,
the unsayable. One cannot express the infinite in finite terms.
"How many colours
are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'green'...Imagine
the world before 'the beginning was the word'" S. Brakhage
On the
other side of the coin is the impossibility of expression, and taboos against
expression, of the horrific. Words fail us in the face of unimaginable, let
alone unutterable, horror. It seems to me that there are three aspects to the
question of this silence: the impossibility of speaking the unspeakable; the
effect of trivializing and distorting if one attempts to do so (how to make a
film about the Holocaust, for example, without turning the Holocaust into
material for a film); and the problem of keeping things hidden and, thereby, unresolved (only by
acknowledging the situation can the processes of mourning and healing begin).
The danger of speaking is in losing the horror of the event that is behind the
words. Words make familiar, commonplace - if it is spoken of it becomes
acceptable, even to-be-expected. Namimg as betrayal.
In other situations, however, to name is to have power. To leave unsaid, find
euphemisms for, or censor, denies the existence of the situation. Naming as fidelity.
The question is not whether to
forget or remember, but rather how to remember.
B.St.
August 27
Dear
Ingrid,
My own
filmwork and preparation for this project have been on hold. My father died
this summer. Realizations about life
that come from an experience with death are finding echoes in my work - the
uncertainty of life, the humility of not knowing. From the experience of our
own powerlessness, we understand how life is not 'ours' but something that
moves through us. The feeling germinates, perhaps was always there and is now
acknowledged, of something so mightily beyond us, beyond our control, beyond
even our comprehension. The mystery ‑awesome and awful-
of it all.
"The unsayable can
be given me only through the failure of my language. Only when the construct
falters do I reach what it could not accomplish." C. Lispector
There is a
tension between our need to articulate something of this power and mystery,
something of love, and our experience that the highest expression is silence. The silence that is behind words, the state beyond words.
The Jewish prayer of Remembrance for the dead, the 'Yiskor' service praises G‑d,
then acknowledges that G‑d is beyond our words,
then goes back to praising G‑d! Humans keep trying to give expression to
the inexpressible.
"When we have been
abandoned by meaning, the artist has a professional duty to bear witness that there is, to respond to the order
to be." J.F. Lyotard
The
sublime/horror seem not only linked but both to arise from an awareness of
death. Death is the ultimate dissolution of boundaries. Julia Kristeva locates
the power of horror in the dissolving of boundaries. She describes the abject
as "that which does not respect borders, rules, positions; disturbs
identity, system, order... the abject draws me toward the place where meaning
collapses..." Perhaps our discomfort or revulsion around madness or
physical deformities or bodily functions has to do with the blurring of borders
that define us: rational, whole, intact,
clean, contained, in control. However,
viewed from a different perspective, when boundaries between 'I' and 'other',
bewtween one's own life and Life dissolve, conflicts that arise from perceived
duality disappear. For Kristeva, too, abjection is seen not only in
destructive terms; there is a recuperative aspect. "Abjection is a
resurrection that has gone through death [of the ego]. It is alchemy that
transforms death drive into a start of life, of new significance."
"The problem is to
go into oneself...Go to the darkest parts and the brightest parts...Art is to
embrace others whether to convey something difficult or talk about light."
J. Wieland
“No man has
ever witnessed the moment when life begins; it is in the moment of its ending
that the limits of life, hence life itself, are manifest. Death, as the edge
beyond which life does not extend, delineates a first boundary of being. Thus
the ending is, for man, the beginning; the condition of his first consciousness
of self as living.” Maya Deren, The Divine Horsemen
I am
looking at points of crisis or breakdown as openings where we hold together in
the same moment the impossibility of death and
its inevitability, the longing after freedom and acceptance of our inability to control circumstances. Certain
experiences allow, or force us to face the abyss, to return to the source -
pre-verbal, speechless. "So many
years, and nothing important settled. I realize I know nothing." (Vera
Frenkel, "The Bar Report")
Coming to know that we know nothing, not as a regression to the
innocence of childhood, but as life's progress. In the unanswered
question, awe.
"Reason's last
step is that there are a number of things beyond it." Pasca
l
"It was enough to
exist, preferably still and silent, in order to feel its mark...the mark of
existence." C. Lispector