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The
potential relation of video art to fiction is a subject often posed badly by
its commentators, or simply avoided by its practitioners. I am not speaking
here of the capacity to make conventionally well-rounded or naturalistic
narrative anecdotes. Let us assume, for the purposes of this argument, that the
practice known as video art has no need or desire to produce such standard
work. The problem remains that, in differentiating itself from a certain
standard kind of fiction, video art has often dodged even thinking about
fiction as a category.
Numbed
many a time by an indifferent procession of hi-tech video art tapes, I have
found myself hearing – or hallucinating, in wish-fulfilment mode – the call of
fiction. A certain, profound tendency in video art has remained resolutely the
same across almost three decades, even though its surface manifestations have
varied enormously: a will to formalist abstraction, polemically
underwritten by a refusal to tell stories of any sort. As if fiction were the
original sin of the irredeemably damned mainstream media – cinema and
television. Whether the denial of fiction in video art takes the form of a Zen
meditation on slowly evolving shapes and colours (the preferred response of a
previous counter-culture), or a random
hyper-collage of fragments (the postmodern gesture par excellence), the
philosophy is somewhat the same: “A story? No. No stories, never again.” (2)
One
can perhaps dignify, for a moment, this tendency in practice and in theory by
considering a line of speculation which has been gathering momentum for a few
years now. In the finest, most confident attempts at proposing a theory of art
video, we find a cluster of ideas around time. For Jean-Paul Fargier,
cinema’s essential concern is the mastery of space – the edges of the frame,
what is in or out of the singular image at any given moment – which is,
equally, space’s brutal mastery over time, reducing it to a simple function
like anticipation. But, he claims, video liberates the creative role of time –
as that which multiplies images – and takes the nervous edge off narrative
space. Video time “unfolds” a play of images and sounds. “To translate the
problem of space into a question of time is a new way to render the invisible
visible.” (3)
What
is in the space that Fargier chooses to downplay in the name of video art? It
is a narrative space: deep, seamlessly connected from shot to shot, at one with
an overall stylistic design. This space adds up to the representation of a scene – and the scenes add up, in a
linear fashion, to a story. Hence – following this logic that is mostly
implicit but very powerful in the realm of video art – we arrive at a preferred
sort of counter-image. If it must be representational at all, a typical
shot/image should be: flat, autonomous, a building block in a variable editing
arrangement, arbitrarily stylised. Plot is overridden by that which it is said
to repress: gesture, bodies, direct narration of the artist’s viewpoint. Or,
fiction gives way altogether to other forms: essay, poem, demonstration, free
association. (In
Australia
,
I could use most of Randall & Bendinelli’s or Jill Scott’s work to
exemplify these predominant characteristics of video art.)
Fargier
opposes space to time, cinema to video. Raymond Bellour, in a lucid statement
on video that is already the fruit of a near-decade of reflection, takes on an
even more popular division, video vs. television, and finds there the war of
two kinds of time. TV time is – you guessed it – “institutionalised time … an
undifferentiated, homogenous time”. TV is paranoid and noisy, it aims to
“substitute itself for time”, “to be time”; and it will “barely
tolerate difference, if at all.” (4) Video art, then, resists TV by
reformulating time: slow time, cyclical time, deformed time, abandoned time.
Here again, the linearity of conventional fiction is revealed as the
true villain in this scenario. A certain regime of linear time (and narrative
space) which is irreversible, forward moving, single minded, tyrannical,
riveting: in contemporary critical mythology, this constitutes a veritable Grim
Reaper.
Neither
Fargier nor Bellour are hostile to video art taking recourse to fiction;
Jean-Luc Godard, for instance, is an exemplary figure for both of them. But one
might be wary in expectation of the sympathetic vibration their celebration of
new modes of time will meet in areas of the video art scene more firmly
disposed against the prospect of engaging with fiction. What I believe needs to
be usefully done now is a sorting out of definitions, and a proposing of
possible avenues of experimental work with fiction.
To
start, we should clear out the time-worn experimentalist assumption (adopted by
video art from avant-garde film) that there can be a type of artistic work
absolutely beyond or uncontaminated
by fiction – that abstraction, for instance, can be opposed to fiction. Bellour
very helpfully suggests that fiction has in fact two centres, an abstract centre and a concrete centre. The abstract centre is
zero-degree fiction, “a sort of minimalist drama which establishes a
situational relationship between at least two elements.” (5) Every viewer of
video art is probably familiar with those instructive moments when an audience,
fed up with the play of pure abstractions, decides to bring narrative
expectations to bear on the least likely of narrative events: when the blue dot
from the left of screen finally collides with the red dot from the right, a
cheer of relief fills the hall! Such zero-degree fiction is indeed the basis of
many jokes played by avant-garde fiction on its own formalist history, as in
James Benning’s work, or David Chesworth’s tape Indecidable Objects. An
abstract fiction, we can say, is not so much plot as intrigue –
and virtually anything can be situationally intriguing.
Fiction’s
other centre is its more properly representational one: scenes, stories,
characters; the location of a fictional world or diegesis. (The effort not to
conflate fiction with representation should always be made; for instance, there
can be a work that is all diegesis but little plot, more description than narration.
Minimalist narrative cinema already gives us strong examples of this, such as
Chantal Akerman’s Hotel Monterey, 1972.) If video art has historically not wanted to acknowledge its abstract
fictional centre, its position on the concrete centre has been loud and clear:
smash it, invert it, deconstruct it, gum it up.
Yet
I assert that we can start again in trying to figure out a mutually productive
negotiation between video art and fiction. Again, a distinction made by Bellour
can be put to good use. He contrasts fiction as system to fiction as
substance. The system of fiction is its structuralist outline: the
inventory of standard structures, mechanisms, codes and conventions at the base
of most audiovisual stories. A concern purely with fiction as system gives
rise, in video art, to a familiar brand of meta-fiction: easy jokes at the
expense of character stereotypes, devices of cause and effect, cliché signs,
set moves – boy meets girl, the Eiffel Tower, happy endings, etc. etc. (eg.,
Randall & Bendinelli’s Love Stories, 1984). This is the kitsch end of the vogue for quotation. The other end is
sober, Brechtian, purist – but equally confined to fiction as system.
Engaging
with fiction as substance requires a
more difficult effort. The process consists of, in Bellour’s description, the
“materialisation, scenarisation and dramatisation of substantive entities” –
characters, scenes, a milieu and so on. The challenge for experimental art
would be to articulate these entities in such a way that they do not cohere in the conventional, linear
fashion. But still to produce and use the flesh, the life of substantial
fiction; to transcend the sketch approach that tends to strip fiction down, in a parodic or purist fashion, to
the skeleton of its systems.
For
a number of complicated reasons, video art (like Super-8 film) practitioners
are still holding off, a little scared and defensive, from engaging with
fiction as substance. Underneath the vestiges of polemical refusal, we might
suspect the signs of a few enduring phobias: the fear that fictional
affect/emotion is too sticky, too hard to control; the inability of
visually-based artists to conceive of a workable, productive relationship with
flesh-and-blood actors; the well-founded hunch that the mise en scène and careful rhetoric of mainstream fiction (through and below the simple
systematics of plot) might be more complicated than they at first seem.
There
is one approach to fiction lying around in recent history of critical writing
and independent filmmaking that is ideal for video art. The late ‘70s/early
‘80s writing of Stephen Heath or Lesley Stern outlines this approach; the film
works of Yvonne Rainer, Mark Rappaport or Akerman exemplify it. All of David
Chesworth’s work in many media, particularly his tape Insatiable (1987),
has been dedicated to exploring it; the Susan Charlton-Stuart Cunningham-Ross
Harley tape One Block From Heaven (1986) also gestures in this
direction.
Let
us briefly evoke the kind of fiction which Heath refers to as the novelistic. (6) We are in a story
which is pulling back, obsessively, to a point of origin – but an uncertain,
unstable, perhaps illusory origin. A text
of memory unfolds; different attempts are made by the narrator and the
narration to retrieve the primal scene from which everything is felt to
devolve. But the story before us is haunted by fundamental absences.
Novelistic
fiction conventionally connects up three terms: story, identity and place. For the fictional character, the
ability to ultimately reconstitute and tell a biographical story (one of origins and destiny) would be to form an identity and to nail down a secure place for themself in the scheme and
flow of things. For the spectator, an analogous process occurs: finding one’s
secure place as the recipient of a narration; piecing together a vicarious
biography; being affirmed in one’s conventional (cultural) affective response.
If
novelistic fiction exists (as Heath would say) to map the imaginary (the texture of one’s whole emotional life, desires,
shifting and multiple identities) onto the symbolic (a singular, contained, socially sanctioned identity), then experimental art
engaged with such fiction would have as its aim the uncoupling of these two
realms or fields, imaginary and symbolic. It would work towards a constant and
strategic displacement of character and spectator alike through a whole set of
identifications, affects, positions, situations. The vast rhetoric of emotion
and narration in conventional fiction would still be put into play; but it
would be freed, made mobile.
Too
few video artists are scholars of
Hollywood
cinema; but perhaps it is this cinema, above all, which is at stake in video’s
interrogation of fiction and of its use of “the cinema film as memory and
quotation” (Bellour). Two memories, both equally personal and collective, both
cultural, are in action: the memory of the American cinema itself, the long-ago
experience of its fantasy-map, its imaginary; and the memory that is invented
and narrativised within each particular fiction. Two kinds of biography which
can both be rendered as ‘moving places’ (as in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s great book
of that name).
With
unbelievable violence, the call of (the) fiction: a call to return, to revisit
the scenes embedded in one’s memory. “These images look at us … from the depths
of a long-lost childhood (the photograph’s time par excellence)”. (7) A return
to what? Not to a unique, personal, interior experience, but to a collective
imaginary: a realm of emotionally invested images. |
