Jeremy Welsh
Professor/MA Course Leader in Visual Arts, Bergen National Academy of the Arts.
Like History? Like Geography?
Image, memory, space and time in film and the electronic image
Certain film-makers (most notably Chris Marker, perhaps) have chosen to reject the predominantly linear narrative structures of cinema in favour of an essay form that explores the image’s poetic potential, often within a meditation upon time, place and memory. In “La Jetée” and “Sans Soleil”, Marker produced what are arguably two of the most significant achievements in moving-image culture of the twentieth century, whilst his latest work in digital media from the mid nineties onwards clearly prefigures the aesthetic terrain of the twenty first century.
Peter Greenaway has, in recent years, spoken frequently about “the end of cinema” and has extended his aesthetic practise beyond the boundaries of the cinematic frame and into a field that merges with contemporary visual art and the more generalised realm of technological multimedia communication.
The media theorist Lev Manovich proposed the term “Database Aesthetics” in his influential book “The Language of New Media” and has since gone on to engage in a number of projects that develop this theme both theoretically and within creative practise.
Author Iain Sinclair and film maker Chris Petit, in their 2004 production “London Orbital” combine a meditation upon the changing nature of the (post) cinematic image and the ubiquity of electronic imaging with a psychogeographic exploration of the “dead space” of a circular motorway, stitching together a multi-layered narrative with a plethora of sub-plots and (hypertextual) references.
Artists Jane and Louise Wilson have constructed a series of large-scale video installations and photographic works that open up inaccessible, lost, hidden or forgotten spaces and at the same time they probe beneath the surface of appearances to reveal the image as a deep repository of memory and understanding. In their works, the image is never subjected to modification by written or verbal language; they elaborate their own grammar through the juxtaposition of images.
These represent just a few reference points within a field of moving image culture that has been the primary site of my activity as an artist, curator, writer and educator since the end of the seventies. My current research, which will result in work to be exhibited at Bergen Kunsthall in November 2005, as well as in written materials and lectures, is focussed upon the ways in which we construct visual narratives, image spaces, memory filters, devices for manipulating time. Referencing sources such as Gaston Bachelard’s book “The Poetics of Space”, in addition to the examples mentioned above, I am engaged in a process that aims to cross reference and interconnect the strands of my aesthetic practise, set against a background of rapidly evolving image technologies and a visual culture that has vaporised any sense of a stable definition of art. For me, both artistically and theoretically, it is vital to embrace the complexity of the current cultural situation in order to avoid a common pitfall of the contemporary art scene; where one orthodoxy simply replaces another and the real multiplicity of living culture is reduced to a set of terms. Modernism is out, Relational Aesthetics is in, but unfortunately neither of these constructs provides an adequate framework for addressing what art, or visual culture, or pop culture, or contemporary society really is, in all its complexity and perplexity.
