What of dance is welcomed in the museum, and what remains on the outside? Artist Tino Seghal's “constructed situations” redirect this question, reworking relations of inside and outside, participant and observer, subject and object through a collective bodily attending to the situation itself. This article explores the conspiratorial techniques activated by This Situation (2007) to consider how dance moves in and with the museum. These techniques, which are derived from or affiliated with those of performance (the intricate negotiation of bodies, movement, and time in relation), include repetition, remixing, distributed movement, conspiratorial breathing, the compliment, disjunctions between words and gestures, and more as part of the work's ecology of practices. As interpreters of the piece in Montréal (and, as such, embodied archivists), the three authors take up key issues such as tensions between ephemerality and preservation, dance's anarchival propensity, and the contagious corporeal techniques of the piece that pass between interpreters and visitors, human and object materialities, and which traverse heterochronicities of the event and its resonances. We propose that what is specific to Sehgal's work within the museum is a holding of movements and relations as a way of persistently making and unmaking its forms, contents, and relations—as a way of making art contemporary, so to speak, via dance's propensity to always begin again. This commitment to re-beginning is what we term Sehgal's impersonal ethics: how This Situation (re)activates and relies on the generation of intensive but ambiguous embodiments.
How can we understand the ecosophical approach of a film like Leviathan, which refuses conventions of representational filmmaking? Drawing on Raymond Ruyer's notion of survoler, or self‐survey, to describe a mode of witnessing without distance, this article explores two aspects of self‐survey in Lucien Castaing‐Taylor and Véréna Paravel's groundbreaking work of sensory ethnography. Both the ubiquitous seagulls and the innovative use of GoPro cameras here propose witnessing as an ethico‐aesthetical act in a way that challenges documentary norms.
The direct time-image is the phantom which has always haunted the cinema, but it took modern cinema to give a body to this phantom. -Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image 1 David Lynch's 1997 film Lost Highway is haunted by the specter of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), itself a ghost story on many levels. 2 In Lost Highway, the spectralizing effects of recording and communication devices are rendered in graphic form; characters get "lost in the medium," in the delay of the lost time. No longer simply the art of the index, Lost Highway puts the virtual observer into the scene, and characters are caught in the movement of affect, a vertigo of suspense that is not simply epistemological in nature. Inspired by the spiral form that dominates Hitchcock's masterpiece, Lost Highway explores the effects of living in a world characterized by paramnesia. A form of déjà vu, paramnesia is a disjunction of sensation and perception, in which one has the inescapable sense of having already lived a moment in time, of being a witness to one's life. Consider Gilles Deleuze's description of the crystal image, a key element of the time-image in Deleuze's analysis of cinema. The crystal image is an indivisible unity of an actual image and its virtual image:The present is the actual image, and its contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror.According to [Henri] Bergson, paramnesia (the illusion of déjà vu or already having been there) simply makes this obvious point perceptible: there is a recollection of the present, contemporaneous with the present itself, as closely coupled as a role to an actor. 'Our actual existence, then whilst it is unrolled in time, duplicates itself alongside a virtual existence, a mirror image.' 3The effect of this doubling is manifestly uncanny; as Bergson goes on to describe it: "whoever becomes conscious of the continual duplicating of his present into perception and recollection will compare himself to an actor playing his part automatically, listening to himself and beholding himself playing." 4 Like Hitchcock, whose greatness, and also violence, in a sense, was to adapt characters to the situation of the camera, David Lynch is one of the great thinkers of the relationship between recording mediums and the human form. Lost Highway takes to extreme Deleuze's contention that in the time-image, the hero "records rather than reacts." 5 Lynch explores this on a literal level, examining the effect of recording devices and communication mediums, and insisting on the uncomfortable fit between them and the human form. In Lynch's films, technologies have an anamorphic effect on the body; that is to say, they do not metamorphize the body into a new, completed form, but de-figure it-visibly and aurally. 6 As such, even the most familiar technologies, such as electricity or the telephone are rendered in such a way as to highlight their "dirtiness"-to make visible what we have become accustomed to ignoring. Electricity has a presence in Lynch's work, not merely as a conduit or medium, but ...
Vidéo de Femmes dans le Parc (VFP) (Women’s Videos in the Park) is a summertime open-air screening of independent short videos, held annually since 1991 at Park La Fontaine in Montreal, Canada, by Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV), an independent feminist/queer distribution company. In this essay, we explore VFP’s historical use of public space and its reimagination under Covid’s urgent sanitary crisis and chronic social inequities. Within the media ecology of Montreal’s outdoor cinemas, we see GIV’s creative decision to move VFP online during Covid as part of a longer history of alternative media’s unconventional exhibition modes that address social inequalities. As such, we first situate VFP within GIV’s wider mandate of dissemination of video work by women. We then analyze VFP’s “visual architecture” under Covid, stressing the organizers’ original strategies to reproduce a sense of eventness even through online exhibition. We conclude with questions of embodied and affective labor, including audiences’ wellbeing, artist renumeration, and self-care, that the shift online entails for the organizers of VFP.
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