Marilyn Henry and Me 1956-2011

Portfolio

120 Days and Nights of

STAGGERING + STAMMERING

The young man at the beginning of Tarkovsky’s Mirror stammers and stutters, and learns not to. My grandmother staggers out of The China Hall Pub, The Pimlico, The Eagle The White Horse Tavern and never learns. In the icy wastes of the French Alps she dives into freezing lakes followed by my grandfather, without a St. Bernard for company. The Soho Troy Bar always clings. However far I try and get away from Grey Gardens it still tugs me back to ‘Tea for Two’.

Our lives are smeared throughout the world, recalled through disparate, dissolute, fragmentary images, sounds and memories. 120/360 Days and Nights of STAGGERING + STAMMERING is an installation that sucks in and spews out images of the people and surroundings it encounters, real or imaginary, wherever it happens to stumble, New York, London, Iquitos.

Consisting of an old SLR film camera and a LED spotlight each of the 120/360 ‘projectors’ will throw out images of the people, events and the fabric surrounding wherever it is deemed fit to be exhibited, in an ever changing, cavorting carousel, that documents the transitory lives that pass through this crystalline world. These images will be taken before and during installation and while the installation is up and running. The audience will be invited to donate their own images of the area showing their experiences in it and of it, which then will be re-photographed and slotted into these projectors.

A dense flickering array of images negotiated and dictated by the space, can be projected into, onto and outwards of any given situation/site. They prefer shady aspects but can flourish during daylight hours too. The larger less bright images are made visible by the descending gloom of the night. The smaller, closer to the wall/ceiling/floor, ones can cope with the intensity of other light sources. The projectors can be clumped together in one location or be spread around different locales as needs be

A dense flickering array of images negotiated and dictated by the space, can be projected into, onto and outwards of any given situation. They prefer shady aspects but can flourish during daylight hours too. The larger less bright images are made visible by the descending gloom of the night. The smaller, closer to the wall/ceiling/floor, ones can cope with the intensity of other light sources. The projectors can be clumped together in one location or be spread around different locales as needs be.

Deleuze’s text on Godard, points out how Godard’s filmwork is essentially inbetween; between text and image, cinema and television, sound and vision, passion and politics. If we consider it, the very concept of montage is itself the meaning inbetween, the rupture between the two images, the fissure of intensity created by the juxtaposition. Deleuze goes on to describe this disaggregation as stammering. Which for Godard becomes a visual stammering, to stammer not in one’s language, but in how one sees. Where the language of cinema is disassembled, taken down to its elements, to produce a molecular cinema, the twenty-four frames a second. As Godard himself says, it is, “admitting that you’re stammering, that you’re half blind, that you can read, but not write…” The question is always what is there to see? What is imperceptible? These are Godard’s reasons for dissolving linear narrative and normative cinema conventions.

[By Robert Lort at http://members.optusnet.com.au/~robert2600/godard.html]

The audience will be enveloped in and disrupt this cacophony of images, creating and destroying as they wander through and around them. Shadows will appear and obliterate the wall images only to reappear on the bodies of the transgressors. The images will be instantly recognisable as they will depict places just passed through on the way to the exhibition site. There will be temporal shifts occurring sometimes of mere days alongside others of an indeterminate age. Referents will be lost and gained throughout this encounter.

The projectors are simple ‘plug and play’ devices that are ready to go. Each one uses 1 Watt of electricity and the LED light runs cool with a minimum of heat loss. They come in ‘groups’ of five or six each with its own lead and extension cable. They are easily manoeuvrable and transportable. They come in their own cases which then double up as steady platforms which give the projectors an anchoring point.

The Shade of Cardinal Richelieu.

In a splendid chamber of the Palais Royal,
formerly styled the Palais Cardinal, a man
sitting in deep reverie, his head supported on
his hands, leaning over a gilt and inlaid
table which was covered with letters and
papers. Behind this figure glowed a vast
fireplace alive with leaping flames; great
logs of oak blazed and crackled on the polished
 brass andirons whose flicker shone upon the
superb of  the lonely tenant of the room,
which was illumined grandly by twin
candelabra rich with wax-lights.

http://ebooks.gutenberg.us/PGCC/3musk10.htm

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