Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), The - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2013

This article addresses the materialist screen works of Canadian artist Michael Snow. It argues that Snow’s lifelong experimentations with different media technologies have always encompassed a rigorous and precise understanding of the phenomenology of the different viewing situations in which his works are seen. Two aspects of Snow’s practice are singled out as inherently connected: medium specificity and audiency. Snow’s artworks provide us with unique opportunities to grasp the complexities of changing forms of intermediality and spectatorship at a time when media are more fluid and ephemeral than ever before.

In May 2012, I organized the symposium ‘Lighting the Cave’ at Central Saint Martins in London. The symposium set out ‘to interrogate themes of light, reflection and “truth” in and across the expanded field of artists’ film and video’. Sean Cubitt’s article, which follows this article, is a revised version of the keynote presentation he gave that day, entitled, ‘The shadow’, and sets the tone for much of what follows. ‘Lighting the cave’ was in many ways an extension of the exhibition, ‘Platon’s Mirror’ by the German artist, Mischa Kuball, a subtle and contemporary re-staging of Plato’s allegory of the cave in the context of modern media culture (CSM, 3–25 May 2012). Kuball’s mixed-media installation was also shown in the Lethaby Gallery at CSM during the symposium and triggered a number of ‘dialogues’ around themes of mediation in relation to artists’ practice in the twenty-first century. Fittingly, Kuball describes himself as more of a ‘mediator’ than an artist; something I wish to explore more fully here in relation to contemporary moving image practices. As part of this role as ‘mediator’ – which is less about producing art objects and more about creating situations – Kuball employs in his work what David Joselit has described as different ‘formats’, a term that complicates traditional notions of ‘media’. Rather than identifying his work within strict definitions of ‘film’ or ‘video’, Kuball uses light, travel, dialogue, code and public/private space as some of his ‘mediums’ or indeed ‘formats’. Notwithstanding, he often makes videos and employs the photographic within these practices. With Kuball’s practice as a starting point, this article will attempt to uncover the interconnected themes of artist as mediator and art as experience in relation to historical works made by artists using film.

This article considers cinematic time in James Benning’s film, casting a glance (2007), in relation to its subject, Robert Smithson’s 1970 earthwork Spiral Jetty, and his film of the same name. The radicalism of Smithson’s thinking on time has been widely acknowledged, and his influence continues to pervade contemporary artistic practice. The relationship of Benning’s films with this legacy may appear somewhat oblique, given their apparent phenomenological rendition of ‘real time’. However, closer examination of Benning’s formal strategies reveals a more complex temporal construction, characterized by uncertain intervals that interrupt the folding of cinematic time into the flow of consciousness. Smithson’s film uses cinematic analogy to gesture towards vast reaches of geological time; Benning’s film creates a simulated timescale to evoke the short history of the earthwork itself. Smithson’s embrace of the entropic was a counter-cultural stance at the end of the1960s, but under the shadow of ecological disaster, this orientation has come to appear melancholy and romantic rather than radical. Benning’s film returns the jetty to anthropic time, but raises questions about the ways we inhabit time. His practice of working with ‘borrowed time’ is particularly suited to the cultural and historical moment of his later work.

In both electronic scanning and film projection the image must disappear for fragments of every second. Where perspective rests on a vanishing point, projection relies on a vanishing instant, the sudden plunge into imperceptible darkness. This article traces the art history of the vanishing of the image in the history of shadow. For Plato, who wants to remove all trace of subjectivity and the doxa associated with it, shadows are evidence of the mediating role of knowledge, which reveals the temporality of truth. Platonic and positivist arguments for, respectively, the untruth or the indexical quality of photography are countered by experimental practices in film and video, which point us towards the constitutive ephemerality of mediated light and its relation with shadow.

This article examines video and animation works by the artist-duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, known together as Semiconductor. Over the course of the last decade, their works have come to occupy a unique position in the world of artist’s film and video with projects that blend – in philosophically compelling ways – experimental video art techniques, scientific research and digital technology. In works like All The Time In The World (2005), Brilliant Noise (2006), Black Rain (2009) and Magnetic Movie (2007), they approach some of the grandest subjects in the physical sciences (geomorphology and astrophysics) in ways that engage with the metaphysical implications of aesthetically mediating natural forces whose magnitude and actual nature far exceed any capacity for normal perception. For these projects, Jarman and Gerhardt have immersed themselves in rigorous research at prestigious scientific institutions such as the NASA Space Sciences Laboratories (SSL) and the Mineral Sciences Department at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Here they were given privileged access to scientific research technologies as well as personal instruction by some of the foremost scientists in their fields. However, as artists exhibiting their work in gallery contexts, Semiconductor’s creative freedoms have been largely unimpeded by obligations to conform to strict scientific accuracy or to the narrative codes of traditional science documentary. Indeed, the single and multi-channel installations that have resulted from their research are hybrid experimental artworks that engage with their subject matter on a number of different levels, with varying degrees and manifestations of scientific ‘truth’. In this article I argue that, in spite of their blurring of discipline boundaries, many of their works enact and embody a philosophy of science that is engaged with technological investigation and its ability to expressively reveal the material nature of our universe.