Beauty and The Cinematic Essay.
Beauty has a bewildering control over our lives and “to simply seek aesthetic pleasure, is a failure of our morality” (Higgins 31 Beauty) because we get caught up in ideas of unattainable perfection. This is difficult to avoid when the voyeuristic experience presented by Moving Image and Photography, allows for this faux world to project back into the spectator’s lives, rather than remain inside the monitor.
Beauty plays games through its optical illusion of aesthetics, and under the realm of The Cinematic, its handiwork rests on the foundation of the spectacle. So smack your lips together and taste the bitter sweet lie, because behind that beauty rests a matrix of construction and manipulation.
Photography, as a freezer of time, halts a moment of beauty, which a viewer takes as evidence of the best. While Moving Image keeps a stillness like photography, it also includes a “domain for conceptual space” (Viola, Reasons For Knocking...) through its use of time. Beauty, Cinema, Photography and Moving Image are all stitched up by fragments to erect a final presentation.
The role of cinema, post 1960’s, with the blockbuster ‘Some Like it Hot’ (1959) starring the glorious Marilyn Monroe, introduced the glamorisation of cinema and permitted scopophilia, by getting lost in a realm of fiction. Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist, published an article in 1975 titled ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ which looks into the economical history of the cinema and it’s shifts in technology altering the position of the spectator. Another point of perspective is the entertainment the cinema provided and how this set up a means of escapism. Films give people an opportunity to escape into another life, project themselves onto characters, and live out another lifestyle through the monitor.
Both Beauty and the apparatus surrounding the mediums mentioned above, have the power to control a gaze, to conceal things, to fixate on one perspective, and to capture an audience so strongly, that we get trapped in an intangible world.
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Moving Image holds the same manipulation gifted by the concept of beauty. The moving image confuses your sense of time and space as it is neither a complete perfect piece of film, or a complete perfect still photograph. But it still lures you in intentionally. The work of Yang Fudong, titled ‘FilmScapes’, currently on display at the Auckland Art Gallery, speaks to an art practices’ ability to capture an audience outside of the world of the
image. The exhibition contains a body of work, two of which are shot in 35mm black and white film, and one in colour. Much like the practice of Cindy Sherman, Fudong, as a director, constructs fictional sets to film his characters in, leaving them unscripted and the narrative non-linear. He breaks away from the tradition of cinema, much like Sherman snaps back from the traditions of self-portraiture, by presenting a fragment of a story. The presentation of his first work ‘The Nightman Cometh’ 2011, is presented in a cinematic way, with one large monitor and centred seating. His middle work, ‘The Fifth Night’, 2010, is displayed on seven monitors, illustrating the same scene, shot at different angles, moving across the monitors. His final and most recent work is, ‘The Coloured Sky: New Women II’, 2014, where there are five large projections dispersed within a large room. Some screens are titled, some are placed parallel or in isolation. The content transports between settings from monitor to monitor, much like the work before, and some are more static than the other.
The three works in conjunction present an obvious advancement in technology and viewing positions. All works together have a running theme of no dialogue, leaving an absence, and a gap for the audience’s minds to colour in. The works are all relatively slow paced, dreamlike, have a non-linear narrative, and impose fake scenes/set ups.
In ‘Coloured Sky’ his female characters gaze out longingly at the viewer and the allure of their dream state world sends you into desperation for this utopia. This synthetic sense of time and space talks to the in-between state Susie Salmon experiences in Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones 2009, and the “pleasure in form, can be threatening by
content” (Mulvey, Visual Pleasure... 4) because we’re so perplexed and transfixed by Fudong’s beautiful display of females, snakes, clouds, tents and water, that we become lost. Being lost in this world is dangerous as it means that we cannot see the construction of the space as it’s been so well manipulated into being a familiar setting. “...the presence of time itself can be discovered behind the mask of storytelling” (Mulvey, Cinematic, 135) which is what Susie experiences through out the duration of The Lovely Bones. She is temporarily trapped in this seemingly endless time and space. While stuck in this moment, it is difficult to imagine a way out. Similarly, the frozen image that can be presented by photography is a trap, or halt in time and we cannot see any ending. Trapped in a dream. Trapped in a utopia perfection.
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Beauty, as a totality, is “the perfect object is, rather, one which is finished,
completed” (Cousins, Beauty, 145) which forms a stage for the lie to be told. Seized in this world, blinded by anything other than this utopia, it is oddly beautiful, but something is out of line. Fudong’s work, as a completed product, can not be altered in any way, or else it will not be this magical dreamland. It is an atmospheric hallucination which we see
as a real location. But Fudong has constructed it all. It’s bordering on being a prank on our senses and dreams. This act of image fiction is what Warhol is addressing when he says, “Beauties in photographs are different from beauties in person” (Warhol, Beauty, 173). What we experience as a final, beautiful, totality, is in fact a fiction.
Beauty is a mutual friend to the practice of Cindy Sherman. Talking to the idea of construction, her infamous ‘Untitled Film Stills’ from the late 1970’s, provide a perfect platform for discussing image fiction. Sherman has dressed herself in various roles to emulate the cinematic aesthetic of the ‘screenshot’. These works have “blended filmic acting with photographic posing to recast herself in a range of stock femininities familiar from cinema” (Campany, The Cinematic,14). Sherman has taken a style that her audience will connect to and has paired it with beautiful, female characters, that eyes will marvel over. However, the framing of the photographs leave little evidence for an allegorical or rational reading. Take #13, from 1978, where Sherman is dressed in a blouse, head band and a blonde wig, as she reaches up a book shelf, while gazing out in the opposite direction. Her figure rests on the right hand side of the frame, while the shelves are on the left. She is cropped at her waist, and much emphasis is drawn to the direction of her arm, and her gaze. However, they lead almost nowhere. We cannot see what she is looking at, we also cannot confirm that she is at a library. We cannot see what her legs are doing, or if anyone else is in this situation with her. Based on this fragment she provides, our innate response to fill in the gaps leads us to construct our own narrative. We cannot help but feel like we know this constructed character. How is it that Sherman can be so successful in manipulating us to believe that we can relate to this person she poses as? Sherman’s “double temporality” (Mulvey, Moving Image, 136) is successful because she has carefully crafted aspects of beauty, cinematic style and the role of the spectator, to make us feel as if the image is complete.
As a whole new twist of time and space, caught in a freeze frame, her ‘Untitled Film Stills’ presented a genesis for photography to be more than representational. Ryan Trecartin, a contemporary Moving Image artist, shared that “it’s important to me that the work invent something new, or alternative meanings in the context of something familiar, rather than merely demonstrate something already known.” (Trecartin, Moving Image, 137). Sherman has done this by publishing the deceit beauty has by concealing the falsities through familiar sights. This is through the construction behind the image, it’s fake, and it’s thought out. And it’s a mock of beauty.
Mimicking how we pause our movies at home, Newhall argues that “to examine individual stills is to see only part of a whole, the words of a sentence, the notes of a bar
of music” (Newhall, Moving Image, 104). Behind the red curtain, is a body coated in glitter, prepping for a show. This is a direct link to the writing by Andy Warhol in the Beauty anthology where attention is drawn to the construction of the ‘perfect image’. When Andy Warhol created his self portraits, he claims to have removed his blemishes because “they’re not part of the picture you want” (Warhol, Beauty, 172). Which circles back to the earlier quote from Mark Cousins, where The Beautiful is something of completion, and is “triumphant for having overcome the resistance of itself in its moments of ugliness” (Cousins 146 Beauty). What the role of beauty can do, much like the editing of cinema, it can construct an entirely new reality, and assert it so far in front of another, the lines between reality and fiction are heavily smudged, generating a mode of simulacra. The role of representation is deliberately questioned because this moment is presented without ugliness,fault, or even contingency. So how representational can it be?
What I find interesting about the manipulation derived from these mediums is the ability to escape through this other perspective, personas, characters, narrative, time and space, all because of this constructed, staged process behind the concepts. Photography has the capability to capture and freeze these elements, while Cinema exposes them all under a fixed perspective for mass exposure, while Moving Image becomes the fragmented in- between. Moving image acts as the moment just before the curtain drops and provides a space for an “unfinished thought” (Viola, Reasons for Knocking...).
This idea of moving image being an unfinished thought is a curiosity in my recent project titled “UN”. I presented a ply wood box, varnished for a pleasing finish, with one exterior wall coated in a luscious fur. Inside the box is a small projected 2 minute video. The wall of fur has a small window for the viewer to kneel down and watch through. Before really seeing that it is a viewing window, like a camera obscurer, it firstly provides a sexual connotation: look at this hole in my furry box.
The film is of a female’s face taken from the 4-minute black and white, 16mm film, ‘Portrait of a Girl’ 1966, which revolves around females putting on make up. I extracted an extreme close up of one face and put it in slow-motion as she turns to face the viewer, ending on meeting eye-lines between viewer and subject. This is to talk to multiple physical and metaphorical ideas surrounding the idea of watching and being watched.
To press the emphasis of looking, through the means of mass media and The Cinematic, the audio content of my work has been abstracted from Lynn Hirschhorn’s Screen Tests (a youtube series) of interviews with celebrities. The selection of words was slightly random, from females only and was a matter of listening and choosing, all to fit under references to becoming a different person, and the role of being famous. The purpose of using these lines was to generate a non-linear narrative. I could cut their sentence half way and juxtapose it with another sentence from someone else, and the meaning completely
shifted. This work spoke to the collaging nature of becoming a persona under scrutiny and commented on the real-life manipulation behind figures we admire. In turn, raising the realisation that people and things within out surroundings, are all fractions of a falsity.
I value Moving Image for its ability to contain an element of stillness that photography has, while expanding the image through cinematic qualities. Moving Image is a fragment of a narrative and rests in this in-between state. This uncanny position asks for an audience’s imagination, outside of the frame. It asks them to enter a new space and construct their own sense of time. I’m honing in on this idea, physically with the construction of my viewing box, to allow viewers to enter into a new space and time. By referencing the work of Bill Viola, with his use of slow motion, I have manipulated a sense of reality. Both the audio and visual material have been slowed down, as if they’re almost trapped in this other world, on repeat. It also made the dialogue very deep in nature to employ a male’s tone. The role reversal is playing up popular ideas of gender equality and the exploitation of females, especially through the patriotic eyes of the Cinema.
To conclude, Beauty is an optic for an alternate reality, to fall in love with ‘the perfection’. “What you see is not your gaze, it’s a forced line of vision” (unknown). Again, this utopia universe is non-existent. We scratch at the back of beauty as it lifts us up into another realm of time and space to transcend our sense of reality into fiction. It can be just as easily swept from us, as easily as it was gifted to us. This uncanny in-between is just the beginning, and the end. The work of Cindy Sherman, Yang Fudong, Andy Warhol and Bill Viola, all confidently converse around the topic of falsity, re-representations, and ask more of the viewer than what they provide in their work. “...people are always watching, so there’s always a reason to pose.”(Asher, 94, Thirteen Reasons Why). These artists are
aware that their image based practice is always being looked at, with critical and curious eyes. So, they must carefully craft what they display, in order to trigger an appropriate string of response. They are always on their toes about creating a new state of mind. There is always a reason to construct a final view of something, to perfect it and overcome the ugly, to generate something ideal. But, like oil in water, the two worlds cannot be one.
Dave Beech, ed. Beauty. Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel MIT Press. 2009. Printed Text.
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David Campany, ed. Cinematic. Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel MIT Press. 2007. Printed Text.
Jay Asher. Thirteen Reasons Why. Published in the United States, 2007. Printed Text. !
Laura Mulvey. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (Originally Published 1975) pp. 6-18. Online PDF print off.
http://www.jahsonic.com/VPNC.html
Omar Kholeif, ed. Moving Image. Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel MIT Press. 2015. Printed Text.
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Robert Violette, ed. Bill Viola. Reasons for Knowcking On An Empty House. Writings 1973-1994. London: Whitechapel MIT Press. 1995. Printed Text.
