Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), The - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2012

This article focuses on a three-minute sequence of Pat O’Neil’s 1976 film Sidewinder’s Delta in order to develop a general understanding of the artist’s work. Themes discussed include Pat O’Neill’s embrace of paradox, his iconoclasm, his investigations of formal features of cinematic representation and the resonances of his work with other artists, both recent and classical. These issues characterize O’Neill’s entire oeuvre, but in this article, examples are taken only from works made between 1972 and 2002.

This article identifies a mode of observational film-making among female artists such as Megan Fraser, Beatrice Gibson, Anna Lucas, Rosalind Nashashibi, Elizabeth Price and Emily Wardill, and situates it both formally and historically, in relation to its mode of montaged construction and its relative downplaying of the importance of medium and installation. It argues that through this approach to the moving image, these artists are attempting to understand filming as an act within a social field, for which the act of filming is more important than the act of display. Secondly, it seeks to show that their work bears a consistent fascination with systems and with the materialization of administration, mirroring their understanding of identity and gender as relational rather than static constructs.

This article is based on a paper I gave for the first seminar of a series organized by the AHRC Artists’ Moving Image Research Network, held at Chelsea College of Art and Design in January 2011 – ‘Rewriting History: Interrogating the Past and the Question of Medium Specificity’. The printed version tries to preserve the informal style of the talk, including its jumps of focus and attention. At the risk of being churlish about the ‘Moving Image’, which after all is embedded in the name of the Network and that of this journal, I argue against the notion of a Moving Image culture and its tendency towards homogeneity. I strongly support MIRAJ and its mission, and am glad to be part of it, but I want to question some of the consequences, as I see them, of an inclusive approach to media art in all its many shapes and forms, to which the Network is dedicated in principle and deed. In particular, I think we need more critical distinction and debate in this ever-growing area of practice. I refer to some of the seminar discussion and objections the paper led to, in the hope of stimulating still more responses. The debate goes on, in events, conferences and the art press. Originally, I was going to name this paper after King Lear’s angry growl ‘I’ll teach you differences’, but that hostage to fortune pitched it a bit high. I settled for a milder title, and I hope a milder tone.

Cinema of Prayōga is a conceptual framework that locates the history of experimental film in India within an ancient pre-modern tradition of innovation, of prayōga. Cinema of Prayōga is a theory of filmic practice, which challenges the dominant forms of filmic expression in contemporary India, including the all-pervading contemporary Bollywood or the social realism of Indian New Wave. Cinema of Prayōga celebrates a cinematographic idiom that is deeply located in the polyphony of Indian philosophy and cultural imagination. It attempts to reconfigure the generally accepted notion of the experimental and the avant-garde in Indian cinema by conjuring the term ‘Prayōga’ from Indian philosophical thought. Etymologically, the term prayōga in Sanskrit refers to a theory of practice that emphasizes the potential of any form of contemplation – ritualistic, poetic, mystic, aesthetic, magical, mythical, physical or alchemical. In cinema, it is a practice of filmic interrogation that is devised as a quest toward a continuing process in time and space. This is a cinema that in contrast to mainstream formulations anywhere else in the world, employs Indian music, poetry, mythology and performance to examine the relationship between their status as filmic texts and the ‘fictions-in-progress’ of their subjects.