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A Leap Into the Light
Mike Stubbs
From the White Noise Exhibition Catalogue.
Edited by Mike Stubbs and Ernest Edmonds |
White Noise is an exhibition in real-time. With varying degrees of luminosity, tempo and volume the artworks invite the audience into a space that is both physical and reflective: not to view pictorial representations of something, or document another time or place, but to invite us in to the here and now.
At the inception of White Noise in 2003, I had conversations with three of the artists who were to later make new, commissioned works for this exhibition. Following the births of their children, and in one case the death of a child, they spoke with renewed vigour of exploring nothingness. More words, images and expressions seemed insignificant. Their belief was cemented by a global media landscape that seemed particularly vile and which could not be easily isolated from their recent personal experiences. I witnessed their conviction, and a consolidation in their approach to making work.
Like the pioneers of modernist abstraction, the artists in White Noise share a strong desire to evade narrative, instead choosing to represent 'nothing'. Rather than using technology for the reproduction of an external reality, their skillful manipulation of motion, light and sound invite us into an experience of contemplation, and to reflect on what we feel but cannot see.
White Noise is an exhibition consisting of moving images and, occasionally, images that appear to move. Most of these audio-visual works are sensory, experiential environments. Complimenting them is a selection of web-based works from the exhibition Abstraction Now, first shown at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna in 2003, and a program of seminal abstract films from the 1920s to the 1950s from the collection of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
The design for the White Noise exhibition was initially imagined as a Japanese bath, where the process of cleansing follows particular protocols via a series of different temperature pools. Then, after a series of meetings with the design team, the idea of palate cleansing emerged, referring to the local cultural practice of wine-tasting. In considering the usual problems of minimising audio interference between sensitive audio visual works, yet wanting to avoid building too many physical compartments, we worked towards a corridor of white noise (a combination of all sound frequencies in equal amounts which can help to cancel or mask noise) to create a default or reference position where the viewer might re-set their perception in between art works, through noise and light cancellation.
All the artists in White Noise demonstrate highly proficient technical skills and enjoy working in an area of almost scientific experimentation, in which they can test the limits and find the cracks in-between; they practice the art of the accident. Although working with media and new technologies, none of the artists describe themselves as new media artists. Indeed, Mark Fell and Ryoji Ikeda prefer not to describe their work at all.
Despite having practices, spanning on average over twenty years, many of the artists do not fit into a clear genre. They are comfortable with computer data and digital media and unconcerned by the division of the senses or groupings of artists attached to a particular medium. Fell, Ikeda and Ulf Langheinrich all share significant reputations as composers of minimalist electronica, but their work also draws upon painting, composing, contemporary art and film. Most important is their interest in pure abstraction, whether created by sound waves, interference patterns, custom-made generative algorithms, home-made graphic interfaces or stroboscopic light. Bosch and Simons, however, playfully confound the 'high-tech' associations of digital abstraction in their work, Aguas Vivas. One assumes that the image of a white cross and circle on a black background is generated digitally. Yet, this hypnotic, transitory image is actually produced by a motor, rocking a simple, metal container, filled with oil.
During the research period leading up to White Noise, I was inspired by an encounter with a 'traditional' two-dimensional abstract painting by Debra Dawes - her December 2003 (from 'clock wise' series) 2003 shown at the Queensland Art Gallery. After some twenty minutes viewing the painting, I remembered what it is to look and tune into a considered and reflective mode of perception. I noted the shifting balance, weight and physiological effect of the work before me, the variations in tone and colour saturation, and my changing perceptions of these interrelated elements. In taking the time to look and see the apparently simple, an infinite complexity manifested itself (along with a reminder to myself to spend less time on email saturated with endless information and swamped by 'meaningful' images). I realised that it has taken me years to 'get' abstraction. It can be confronting, and I remember my affront, as a teenage art student viewing Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967), having to view 'event-less' moving images; it was an experience of sheer duration. I could not enjoy this film as entertainment or penetrate the motivation of the filmmaker, and viewing it seemed akin to earlier experiments with my mother's gin. Both tastes took some time to take hold. Abstract art has suffered as much from the mediation of a sometimes overly self-serious culture of high art, as from the actuality of people's experiences.
Yet there is something both genuinely disturbing and deeply educational in abstraction's denial of the familiar. Jonathan Duckworths's superimposition of delicate black generative computer graphics on a black background in his Black on Black, White on White (clearly referring to the Kazimir Malevich work which created such a storm) is deliberately confrontational. Meanwhile Langheinrich creates beautiful fields of granulated video frames. Their very different approaches continue a process of expanding the parameters of how matter can be manipulated and presented.
From Constructivists to Dadaists, early twentieth-century artists related the rejection of art tradition and associated political hegemonies with the emergence of industrial technologies such as film. The non-representational moving images in this exhibition owe much to the history of abstract film with its roots in Constructivism (explored thoroughly in Cindy Keefer's contribution to the exhibition catalogue) and how that has transmuted with the development of electronic media - as they are also indebted to visual art history.
In Malevich's essay On New Systems in Art from 1919 (the year he exhibited his White on White painting), he introduces the notion of making art with the help of 'a law for the constructional inter-relationships of forms', by which he meant the language or system of form rather than representations of the visual world. Through the most basic pictorial elements - colour fields, straight lines and simple geometric shapes - early twentieth-century abstraction referred only to itself and the material conditions of its own existence. This anti-illusionism is crucial to the works exhibited here. In Ikeda's work, data.spectra, we 'feel' an endless flow of data; he is not showing data or making moving pictures of it. Furthermore, in spectra II, Ikeda employs midi technologies to trigger a series of lights and sounds by the participant in a corridor: there is no pre-existent media or content as such, just events in space. Ernest Edmonds, collaborating with Fell, presents an instrument for viewers to play, an interactive 'colour organ' which responds to audience behaviour. Rather than alluding to an imagined space, it simply presents sets of audio tones and colours varying in frequency and pitch. This technical method of 'tool' building shares something with Keiko Kimoto's process of building software to draw lines, rather than drawing lines with computers.
Of Kimoto's work, Imaginary Numbers, Saito Tamaki, psychoanalyst and art critic, writes:
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We cannot 'see' [her] works through our eyes. Therefore it is difficult for us to remember her works and give them meanings. (The Rorschach test tells us that we can imagine various forms from unfixed shapes such as clouds, stains on a wall and so on.) We cannot get any images of such forms from them since they themselves are vivid figures which exist in our brain. Kimoto's works don't yield any representation and context. They merely scoop up a reality of 'changes', an attempt to distil 'secretion of thinking'. |
The White Noise artists are products of a society steeped in a glut of images, unfathomable and washing over us. Within an environment of unstoppable 'progress', these artists have chosen to deny the familiar and comforting replication of our world, and with it, the sickly sheen of stories, lies and popular taste. This is what connects them to the pioneers of modernism. As Malevich put it so beautifully in 1919:
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I have ripped through the blue lampshades of the constraints of colour. I have come out into the white. Follow me comrade aviators. Swim into the abyss. I have set up the semaphores of Suprematism. I have overcome the lining of coloured sky, torn it down and into the bag thus formed, put colour, tying it up with a knot. Swim in the white free abyss, infinity is before you. |
Notes
Kazimir Malevich, On New Systems in Art, as cited in Edmonds, E. A., On New Constructs in Art, Artists Bookworks, Sussex, UK, 2005.
Saito Tamaki, 'Frontier Explorers on the Border', Bijutsu Techo, 2004, pp. 93-103.
Kazimir Malevich, 'The Question of Imitiative Art', 10th State Exhibition Catalogue, Moscow, 1919.
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