Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 41, November 2002
Matt Lee
Technology and the Image
Edited by Annette W.
Balkema and Henk Slager Series of Philosophy of
Art and Art Theory _Lier
en Boog_, vol. 15,
2000 ISBN
90-420-0801-6 192 pp. The advent of digital
photography and the personal computer (and more recently of
the digital camera) has been one of the more noticeable
technological developments in the last few years. With these
new advances there has been a rise in the art practices
surrounding such technology, and this volume of essays is
about what could be broadly defined as 'media art', that is,
art that in some way uses the development of the new digital
medias. There is, however, a wealth of opinion and a paucity
of argument in _Screen-Based Art_, a special issue of the
journal _Lier en Boog_ edited by Annette Balkema and Henk
Slager. In that single fact lies its frustrating inability
to offer little more than snippets or glimpses of thought,
whilst simultaneously lingering long enough after
consumption to stimulate further thought. The primary strength of
the collection is that it contains essays from a wide
cross-section of practitioners and theoreticians of video
and computer-based art, or, as Balkema and Slager have
called it, 'screen based art'. It offers a valuable insight
into a new and undoubtedly dynamic area of moving-image
production. This breadth of inclusion is one of the issue's
strengths, and the addition of an interview with the rarely
translated philosopher Peter Sloterdijk lifts the collection
noticeably. It is clear from the
pieces that there is an almost desperate need to theorise
the practice of video and computer-based art installations,
and, to a lesser extent, the practice of 'media art' in
general. A number of issues are outlined in the
Introduction, around which the contributions coalesce quite
loosely. Firstly there is the idea of 'media art' itself --
is there some specificity that can be established for this
seemingly new realm of practice? The bulk of the
contributions around this first question appear to work with
a communications or information-type theoretical framework,
and issues of meaning are not central to the concerns of
these writers -- although Ken Feingold does address this
problem in his contribution, in particular opening up the
role of the exhibition space in the construction of an
artwork's meaning. The editors expanded on Feingold's
contribution by inviting two further contributions
specifically from art curators who are more directly
responsible for the construction of the exhibition spaces.
The second main issue picked up on was the 'specificity' of
media art and in particular its time-based characteristics.
Finally the relation of media art to the moving image is
explored. The editors write that
cinema has become a 'narrative codification system', playing
a privileged role within the televisual culture as a source
of key visual references, and helping establish a
generalized 'panoptic disposition' (95). The backdrop of the
televisual is thus set up by the editors as something
against which visual artists struggle, 'intending to
liberate the authentic filmic from the homogenous gaze of
dominant cultural logic by constant obfuscation of the
visual' (95). Balkema and Slager then suggest an interest
amongst video artists in Deleuze, not least because of the
value of immanence as a conceptual and artistic tool, and
also because the Bergsonian concept of duration enables a
reworking of our visual experience of time. The 'filmic
image' and its 'internal differentiation' then become the
focus of creation, rather than the narrative structure of
cinema, or the cultural fashions of mass media, allowing the
editors to suggest that there is a resultant hesitation
between painting and video in the 'filmic image'. This
hesitation opens a space of in-between-ness that can allow
the artists to 'show the spectator these basic conditions of
a fundamental communication' (98). Such reliance upon the
authentic, revelatory power of the 'filmic image' suggests
that art as truth giver is still central to the concerns of
the editors, and that they value the truth of an artwork as
a way of valuing it as a practice or object. These comments by Balkema
and Slager come in the middle of the collection, as an
introduction to texts by Chris Dircon, Patricia Pisters, and
Ed Tan -- papers from a symposium they had jointly organised
with the Gallery Ferdinand van Dieten-d'Eendt in Amsterdam.
Dircon argues that there is a move away from the narrative
'meaning-ridden' images to the 'pure image' (102), and that
in fact cinema has always presupposed, as it were, such a
pure image, where the audience 'drop in and out', a sort of
interruption to the narrative. He cites the fact that people
used to pop in and out of movie theaters during a show,
'until far into the 1950's', and that such phenomena
strengthen the idea that 'first of all cinema is more a
dramatic medium than a narrative dictatorship' (105).
Pisters suggests that associationism and memory are vital
tools of conceptualizing the way the visual image is
developed. The huge background of cinematographic images
'have become part of topical memory' (110), and cites
artists such as Douglas Gordon as key examples of the
exploration of such 'memory images'. Cinematographic images
form a source of 'ready made' images, echoing Duchamp's
conversion of the urinal into the gallery object (110).
These 'ready made' or 'already there' images act as a sort
of virtual image, a permanent, ongoing background of imagery
against which visual artists work. Pisters further suggests
that the Deleuzian concept of becoming, of the connection of
one thing to another, is in fact what is being explored in
much visual arts, and that 'the current connection of
cinematographic images and visual art is intrinsically bound
with such processes of becoming where cinematographic bodies
are 'liberated' from the (often) rigid forms of
representation of classic cinema' (112). Ed Tan continues
this notion of the filmic image as a sort of cultural
memory. He accepts that his thesis begs the question of
empirical research: 'Ultimately, empirical research will
have to determine to what extent the filmic image and its
intricate web of imagery is part of cultural memory' (117).
He goes on to argue that 'people do not only remember filmic
events, characters, places and images but also filmic
techniques and styles, all of which evoke memories and
create an atmosphere of time gone by' (121). Tan's piece,
like many others, is more suggestive than substantive, and
is perhaps indicative of the tone of much of the
journal. It is clear from this
symposium, placed centrally in the collection, that the
problem at the heart of the journal is the relation of film
to art, configured not in terms of whether we think films
are art -- i.e.: the rather tedious question of whether
_Apocalypse Now_ is art or not -- but rather in terms of the
artistic status of the video and filmic images of media art
within the art world, in particular in terms of that media
thing. Rosalind Kraus is identified as the author of the
phrase 'that media thing' and she is cited as using it
during an interview with the _Lier en Boog_ editors in 1997.
It serves as a sort of 'epigraph' or focal point for an
object that is without a name. The question of whether there
is anything really new about the 'new media' is present in
many of the contributions, but in such a way that it is
never really put under any strain as a presupposition. There
is never any real exploration of 'that media thing' as a
social, cultural, and political phenomenon. There is an
essentially unwarranted assumption that there has been a
whole set of new medias that have come into play in the art
world. Central to that presupposition is the role of the
personal computer and the internet. The new groovy
technology of the internet is a revolutionary force for
change it seems, and occasionally the contributions reminded
me very strongly of the hype that preceded the Dot.Com
crash. The newness of the new media looks more than a little
tarnished now. Of course the relation of the Dot.Com boom to
the rise of the new 'media art' is never once touched upon
here, even in passing, and this, I think, is indicative of
the complete absence of a political or social component in
the thoughts of the contributors as they are displayed here.
The relationship of capital to art is under-explored to say
the least. In this situation, where a
'new market' is being opened up for the art world, the at
times naive theorizing of many in this collection is
infuriating. At the base of much of the work is a
theoretical assumption that any moving image is intimately
related to any other moving image, and even to the
photographic image, and from there to painting. These
connections can obviously be built, but for theoretical
clarity we also want distinctions. Why should we assume the
relation of video and media art to the filmic image? Is this
assumption necessary? Does the audience automatically make
it? When video is placed within the gallery space there is
an assumption of a social role that is interestingly related
to Duchamp's ready-made. What would happen if we were to
place video art within the cinema setting however? If there
is a relation of visual art to filmic image then is this
relation reciprocal? What is the dominant form that media
art relates to -- the world of cinema or the world of art?
Even to ask this last question suggests that the reliance
upon the surface is theoretically unsatisfying. In the end this reliance
on a surface of connections and suggestions seems to
dominate the collection. The texts are short and often with
brief descriptions of experiences of primarily video art
that never seem to trouble themselves with the positioned
nature -- socially, culturally, intellectually -- of the
author giving the descriptions. The implicit theoretical
models of many of the contributors is plainly influenced by
'new technologies' and 'the information age', with art being
described, by Heiner Holtappels for example, as
'information' (135), with sweeping claims by others such as
Nicolas Schofhausen that 'media art at best serves the idea
of communication' (147), or by Jeffrey Shaw that art that
uses new media must recognize that such technology is 'in
the first place a communications technology' (148). What is
missing from too many of these contributors is any concept
of control, any theorization of power or any notion of the
immanent construction of an art world of which they are
part, as though they retain, throughout all their
interactive new media screen based visual filmic art
installations an ability to control as a subject the
artwork. Only Sloterdijk's fascinating piece really offers
any serious challenge to the main tone of the collection,
along with a polemical piece by Dressler and Christ. These
two contributions lift the rest of the collection as a whole
and suggest possible directions for research programmes that
could begin from the issues raised by the other
contributors. When I suggested at the
beginning of this review that there is an wealth of opinion
and a paucity of argument in this edition of the _Lier en
Boog_ journal, I hoped to suggest that the collection is of
interest as a sort of 'primary text', an expression of the
opinions of working artists -- who appear to theorise their
subject area but in fact display the many un-theorised or
partially theorized presuppositions they are working with.
In this situation it reaches into the heart of current
artistic practice and shows very clearly both the
difficulties and variety of the practice of video art. Some
texts suggest ways in which to understand, whilst others
suggest areas that need further understanding, and the use
of the _Lier en Boog_ collection is that it brings together
a conversation of opinions that can ground further work and
play a useful role in marking a moment in the development of
the moving image. There are more questions than answers in
the collection, but that in itself is a useful first step
towards understanding more effectively the ways in which
technology is increasingly implicated in any understanding
of the moving image University
of Sussex,
Brighton, England Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 Matt Lee, 'Technology and
the Image', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 41, November 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n41lee>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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