Rumour and Radiation

Sound in Video Art

Paul Hegarty

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781623567699
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Music

This is a book about video art, and about sound art. The thesis is that sound first entered the gallery via the video art of the 1960s and in so doing, created an unexpected noise. The early part of the book looks at this formative period and the key figures within it - then jumps to the mid-1990s, when video art has become such a major part of contemporary art production, it no longer seems an autonomous form. Paul Hegarty considers the work of a range of artists (including Steve McQueen, Christian Marclay, Ryan Trecartin, and Jane and Louise Wilson), proposing different theories according to the particular strategy of the artist under discussion. Connecting them all are the twinned ideas of intermedia and synaesthesia. Hegarty offers close readings of video works, as influenced by their sound, while also considering the institutional and material contexts. Applying contemporary sound theory to the world of video art, Paul Hegarty offers an entirely fresh perspective on the interactions between sound, sound art, and the visual.

CHAPTER ONE

Expanding Cinema

In the 1960s, cinema expanded, and it did this not in terms of scale, but through an expansion of the purpose, function, form and process of moving-image artworks. Experimental cinema began (once again) to treat its form as both medium and content. As medium, cinema began to be something more than a sequence of images projected and viewed in movie theatres or cinemas. It began, in short, to leave cinema behind, if only slowly, maybe even grudgingly. This occurred under the influence of happenings, rock music, performance art, television, computer technology and counterculture-friendly philosophy that oscillated between a burgeoning technological lore and cultural prognostic and prophecy. At the same time, film looked at itself as the object of its own activity. This latter can, broadly speaking, be seen as structural cinema, while the former set of processes is more properly the realm of what Gene Youngblood identified as expanded cinema in his book of that name.¹ For Youngblood, cinema was discovering itself in the 1960s, completing a move already underway, and he writes that ‘expanded cinema has been expanding for a very long time’ moving away from literature and theatre (Expanded Cinema, 75). In other words, cinema had slowly been divesting itself of both story and visual narration based on the spatial constraints and conventions of theatrical space. This process is accelerated by technological developments that affect production and consumption of moving-image art – television and videotape being foremost among these. TV frees cinema, argues Youngblood (79), allowing it to establish and develop an ‘intermedia network of cinema, television, radio, magazines, books and newspapers’ (54). The term ‘intermedia’ itself takes a turn into the machinery of media, away from Dick Higgins’ more radical formulation of ‘intermedia’ as artwork and art practice that exceeded the division of works into discrete categories. Higgins’ intermedia returns in Rosalind Krauss’ outline of a ‘post-medium condition’, to which I will return below.² But Youngblood is nonetheless clear that neither cinema nor its successors will be dependent on a particular form of machine – in other words, the machine is not the medium (133).³

Cinema expands into other media, and connects visual phenomena, thus altering its own form. Not all of these media are electrical or electronic. The happening, as demonstrated in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67) – a multimedia collaboration occurring under Andy Warhol’s aegis, and featuring the Velvet Underground. If intermedial technology first develops as an interstitial space, its subsequent expansion is lateral. Film becomes something to be used, a multimedial component, either competing or harmonizing with other activities and art works. Cinema divests itself of its home in the movie theatres of experimental film festivals. It does not leave those entirely, but it does become mobile. From projections of films at art events, concerts or clubs (like the UFO club in London in the late 1960s) to the portable video recorder, cassette and monitor, the moving image extends its reach. Both expansions echo other avant-gardes – dada, the experiments of the Black Mountain college in the 1950s and the parallel growth of Fluxus; the reason it happens in the 1960s is the revelation that cinema does not have a timeless essence whereby everything it is made from must remain the same. The expansion or dispersion of cinema is what is specifically retained in nascent video art. Meigh-Andrews may be making a simple point when he writes that ‘video art can be seen to be part of a tradition that could embrace all these works [structural and experimental cinema styles]’ (A History of Video Art, 80), but if we alter ‘tradition’ to ‘transition’, we can see how the connection works in the maintenance of the expansion of cinema.

Youngblood extends cinema in a further dimension – into depth. New cinema would probe the viewer’s senses to stimulate reactions that would alter consciousness and displace thought from the rational and linear tracking of narration. Unlike the bulk of structural film, where film becomes a self-reflective medium, expanded cinema works inward, downward into the mind, to then bring it upward through newly experienced depths. This newly opened depth will act on the viewer as medium – ‘It’s not so much what we’re seeing so much as the process and effect of seeing: that is, the phenomenon of experience itself, which only exists in the viewer’ (Expanded Cinema, 97). As well as the use of several media, this cinema will cross the senses in order to drive new perceptions and even ‘oceanic consciousness’ (92). On the face of it, this is a simple variant on the various ideas of mind expansion prevalent in 1960s counterculture, but Youngblood is also talking about a medium, here at least, and also of technology altering the relation between human thought and some of its others (cultural product and world, here).

So expanded cinema traverses new technologies and cultural perspectives, without being beholden to them (while clearly belonging to a particular historical juncture). Its changing parameters make of it something multisensory – either something of multimedia or intermedia. Ultimately, cinema leaves cinema behind (49), just as TV is not chained to the machinery of its consumption, or video to its machinery of production, and through this transition runs the thread of sound. From the persistent references to ‘soundtracks’ (a term that suggests the secondary status of sound as accompaniment), Youngblood develops a more interesting position, arguing that in the work of Jordan Belson ‘sound often is [so] integral to the imagery’ (158). Belson’s early work in particular (such as Samadhi from 1967) combines motion in both audio and visual components that swirl together as the work tries to induce the sensory awareness of the universe’s structure and constant flow in a mystical harmoniousness. Further on, Youngblood notes that ‘anything that can be done with sound can be done with video if the proper hardware is available’ (265). He is not particularly interested in focussing directly on the role of sound in film or video but mentions it continually, indicating that it is important and also an expected presence. But it is music that dominates his thinking – either adding to the synaesthetic experience of a piece of film or serving as compositional model (214, 215, 221, all referring to or quoting John Whitney). So expanded cinema conceives of sound as something vital, and more than either decorative or narrative in intent, but within Youngblood’s conception, and that of many practitioners of video art, and indeed, early video installation works such as that of John and James Whitney, it still seems to be working more as an accompaniment. The examples of Warhol’s Outer and Inner Space (1965), Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) and Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) will show how centralizing the role of sound diverts these films away from cinema and into being more than precursors of video art, and instead demands we see and hear them as early versions of what the medium of video art would do.

For Krauss, though, video is not a medium, but part of the dismantling of modernism’s medium specificity and medium investigation, tied into installation art, a non-form or non-medium she distrusts, referring to the ‘international fashion of installation and intermedia work’ (Krauss, Voyage on the North Sea, 56). For all the melancholy in the short book A Voyage on the North Sea, centred on Marcel Broodthaers, and closing on his film of that name, Krauss provides a very useful conceptualization of what happens when film becomes something other than itself, and when video art emerges to cement the loss of medium specificity, notwithstanding that the ‘post-medium’ that emerges looks quite a lot like a new medium, albeit one immune, in Krauss’ view, to modernist critical paradigms in any positive way.

Krauss identifies structural film (focussing on Richard Serra, mentioning Stan Brakhage) as modernist in intent, reflecting on the medium of cinema (in fact its format), such that content becomes form and vice-versa (Voyage, 25–30). Like many of the origin stories of video, Krauss refers to the moment the (Sony) Portapak arrived as central to the ending of the explorations of form that modernism had pursued (24, 30). This machine’s complicity with mass-media, and its capacity to infiltrate multimedia artworks, undid art and film alike, such that both modernist art and critique could find no further purchase:

if modernist theory found itself defeated by such heterogeneity – which prevented it from conceptualizing video as a medium – modernist, structuralist film was routed by video’s instant success as a practice. For, even if video had a distinct technical support – its own apparatus, so to speak – it occupied a kind of discursive chaos. (Voyage, 31)

This moment empties the possibility of any medium maintaining its autonomy – either all art works in proper realms or the whole enterprise changes shape. Broodthaers’ installation work, especially the variants of his Musée d’art moderne: Départment des Aigles, is one agent, but video, in the shape of the incorporation of film and/or video into installations, completes the arrival of a ‘post-medium condition’. The piece Voyage on the North Sea is a film composed of photographic stills and close-ups of different parts of a maritime painting. These are interspersed by intertitles declaring the ‘page number’ we are about to see. The beginning and end of the film focus on the film as film, and grainy scratchiness flickers through the film, reminding us we are not looking at stills at all. The film not only crossed borders between stills and moving images, photography and painting, books and films and modes of reading, it also crossed into a poster, a film canister as art object and a still image. Furthermore, film, including this one, would be a regular feature of Broodthaers’ radical play of self-curated exhibition spaces as artworks. The ‘post-medium’ Kraus identifies as a sort of end to modernism can also be seen as a heterogeneous medium – that of video art in installation form (whether whole or part), but the post-medium is already underway in experimental, expanding cinema, including in some pieces identified as ‘structural’ (like Wavelength), and this against the backdrop of structural film’s inward turn into the mechanics of film as a self-generating autonomy.

Perhaps the first film to operate more on criteria appropriate to video art is Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962). On the face of it, this should not work – it is a film, albeit largely made up of ‘static’ images, shown in cinema settings. But as noted in the introduction above, finding the origin of video art has been problematic, not least when easily ascribed to, say, the making of a particular machine, or a moment in Nam June Paik’s life. Instead, we need to look more archaeologically, retrospectively, from a point today where video art is a developed medium (or post-medium), within which political documentary making, TV subversion or the use of tape over movie film is very much a marginal issue in terms of being radical formal decisions. That is not to deny the history of having looked at video art that way, but to maintain this perhaps legitimate fiction requires a suspension of video history since at least the 1970s, let alone from the 1990s onward. Neither am I just going to take my list of working criteria and show how they work on this or other film pieces of the 1960s. Instead, a few simple things distinguish the films of this chapter from structural or flicker film, and these are: the concentration on images as images; the disdain of camera movement, which thereby alters the dynamic of the film as object for the viewer; the use of narrative at story level as material for visual narration; the move towards multimedia, or more accurately, intermediality; and the very significant use of sound as narrative framing or disrupting device.

Marker would go on to embrace video, then digital recording formats, and questioned the construction of narrative in cinema form. Of course, this was going on elsewhere and, just like expanded cinema, had been present from the start of cinema. The point is that this is not a precursor, but part of the beginning of the process of a developmental form (not format). In terms of its form, La Jetée declares itself a ciné-roman, echoing the format of the photo novel, a genre based on taking real-world images and making a narrative book from them. As a genre it took off in Italy and then France, later to get more widespread renown in the form of picture novelizations of major science fiction films of the 1970s and 1980s, but perhaps the ur-form it takes is Georges Rodenbach’s 1892 Symbolist novel Bruges-la-morte.⁴ In this book, the narrator falls under the spell of images of Bruges, driving him to a tragic and inevitable murder as place, people, dream and real collide. In La Jetée, a picture is at the heart of the plot narration and the film as narration – the image of a woman at the end of the pier at Orly airport, later revealed to be the image of the moment of the protagonist’s own death. This image creates the possibility for the use of images to travel in time, or arguably for time itself to function. This ciné-roman is made entirely of stills and dissolves between them, except for one moment (18.45), where the movement of its second most important figure, the woman met by the protagonist in his past, emphasizes the hybrid and noisy encounter between formats that makes this film intermedial. Not only that, but the significance of vision itself as content is shown, as these few seconds show her moving from dream to waking, lucid seeing.

The film is more like a score (and the score of Trevor Duncan did precede the final version), polyrhythmic, with the fundamental time loop the paradoxical ground. On top of this is the escalation and diminution of changes between images, as well as the different pacing of what can best be thought of as movements within the film. But the image is not the only focus, for the soundtrack of La Jetée is absolutely vital, not just in providing a more linear structure against and on which the images can play but in sound leading the narration. The soundtrack is a curious mix of sound effects (most notably in the form of jets taking off), processed sound (in the shape of what could be heartbeats), which underpins the experimentation phase of the film, choral music recorded at very high volume, which anticipates Kubrick’s use of György Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), whispering and muttering in German, orchestral music, birdsound and a narration external to any of the (unnamed) characters. Of course, an interesting soundtrack does not make something either sound art or video art – but its integration into narrative structures and disruptions in same does – as we are pushed into a realm where there is not a core element surrounded by adjunct and accompaniment. Janet Harbord writes, of the important centralizing force of sound in the film, that

Marker’s use of sound lets in a leakage of various kinds of noise – sounds that are excessive to communication, unruly and often ruled out for that reason. To include them in the sound design of the film, in addition to their unintentional presence in the narration, suggests that noise is meaningful, affective. (Chris Marker, La Jetée, 92)⁵

The whole works as a suggestion of synaesthetic experience: this should not be taken as necessarily indicating a harmonious and simplistic union of affects, as Marker’s film is much too noisy for that, recalling the still-recent development of musique concrète, where found, captured or recorded non-musical sounds could be organized to make something akin to music. Where the image part of this film varies in speed of change (the camera never moving within or above any shot), the sound part is much more disrupted and full of swelling noise – jets, massed birdsound, multilayering of heartbeat sound. Sudden cuts also indicate this film is a project of a disruptive avant-garde, and that the story is a structural part of a whole, not its purpose or ultimate explanation. At the very end, as the protagonist completes his loop in time, the music returns us audibly to the beginning of La Jetée only to fade – echoing not just the sounds but the fade-in of the beginning: the sound loop is complete.

Andy Warhol’s early films largely eschew narrative, relying instead on the image creating a viewing narrative – for example, in Blow Job (1964) or the Screen Tests (1964–66). Long duration films such as Sleep and Empire (both 1964) overwhelm the possibility of development through their length. Empire combines many of Warhol’s film strategies – the static camera, facing New York’s Empire State building, removes the drama of authorial vision; as Douglas Crimp notes, the grain of the film becomes one of the major visual elements of the piece (‘Our Kind of Movie’, 137)⁶ – while film as medium is also being denied. What is the medium here? The building? The turning of the Earth from day into night? Light? While film is made visible, this is not a film about its own medium – instead it is a refusal of format – a kind of non-mediality (not the same thing as something being unmediated, which may nonetheless have been Warhol’s point of interest). In a perverse response to Marker, Warhol’s Empire is about moving pictures (moving film) becoming static, only to move again at a d...