CHARLES DANBY < CURATORIAL PROJECTS ARCHIVE / PRESS /
ABANDONED PROTOCOL------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTERVIEWArtRabbit interviews Charles Danby, curator of Abandoned Protocal at Ritter/Zamet, London.18.09.2007
Beth GreenacreAbandoned Protocol brings together artists from Korea and the UK through a primary discourse of photography that includes video and touches upon performance. Artists include Seung Woo Back, Eloise Fornieles & Kate Hawkins, Ben Judd and Hyung-Geun Park, whose works move through social - psychological - spaces, revealing in the poetical-uncanny of the landscape social codes that disclose considerations of environment and territory - terrains that exist on the margins of inhabited spaces.ArtRabbit: Abandoned Protocol is a group show you have co-curated with I-MYU Projects for Ritter/Zamet, bringing together artists from Korea and the UK who primarily work in photography but who also video and performance. You have said that you have an underlying interest in the idea of the still image can you elaborate on your interest in the still image and how that relates to the works in other media in the exhibition?
Charles Danby: I am interested in the still image as a component part of the moving image. Moving image brings us to the world of cinema and film, but also to the everyday of experience and encounter. Warhol talked about watching TV, about being TV. We inhabit physical spaces, indoor and out, we move from room to room, place to place, we watch films, and occasionally things pass us by. Our experience is the result of moving images, sequences of events, images across time. I am interested in the idea that within this continuum the potential of still images exist.
The photograph is the ideal proponent of the still image, having also become its archetypal form. The still image as photograph puts forward a truth of reality that is absolute, the camera sees as the eye sees, the moment captured is a real moment. The photograph is therefore a document that in replicating authenticates the actuality of a moment. In this sense it has a direct relationship to documentary and documentation. Paradoxically the still image as photograph also represents an untruth, the mechanical appropriation of an incomplete whole. It is a fragment, an edit; it fails to disclose that which exists outside the camera lens, in both a physical and a temporal sense.
Still and moving images, in terms of new media, are inextricably linked. In extending the idea of the still image through considerations of the moving image I was interested in the idea of fragments. In some ways this is to do with considerations of animation, still images, as individual parts, complied into moving sequences, which then extend through video and film, but it is also very much about everyday experience. The idea of stopping and pausing, alluding to the potential of the still image realised by stopping to look at a particular view or vista for instance. This editing and cropping of vision mimics that of the camera, precisely through the familiarity of the photograph, conceiving still images within the act of seeing. It was therefore felt relevant to draw on the moving image within a consideration of photography. The performance base of Kate & Eloise’s piece, resolved as film, is interesting as the act of event draws on another layer of experience, of seeing. Likewise with Ben’s video piece, I Will Heal You (2007) it draws on footage of meetings that he had with a number of individuals, encounters, again offering strong links to a raw conception of the still image as existing within the moving image of the everyday. The still image is therefore about the potential that exists within the moving sequence that we are watching, respectively in the works of Kate & Eloise and likewise Ben, these come to stand as the fragments that we draw out, that catch our attention, if only for a fleeting moment, that instruct the narrative or non narrative of the work.
AR: The use of the still image - or documentation - as a means of understanding the world around us is something that has a long history, how do these young artists use the still image?
CD: The underlying concern at the outset of the work was a consideration of photography. There are social and cultural concerns that underpin the works collectively, but these are variable and not specifically related to issues of documentation, or even ideas of documentary. I think, in all, the use of the still image by these artists, be it through the direct use of photography, or a more discursive use of film, has more to do with structural issues.
This is apparent in the photographs of Seung Woo Back, Hyung-Geun Park, and Ben Judd. The consideration of still image within these works is that it is something that is constructed, manipulated, controlled and played around with. What is interesting is that in quite different ways these works all appear to present something that is fraudulent, but that equally in each case what they offer is fundamentally straightforward, as it appears, without mechanical intervention. The intervention or manipulation is conceptual, structural; any apparent deception also has a truth to it. This idea of contradiction is especially relevant to Ben’s work, as the base for the quasi-Movement that he instigates within the video work shown, I Will Heal You, that is constructed through a continuous rhetoric of contradiction, as disclosed through the manifesto for the Movement, “I am here to convince you to join…I am also here to tell you it is a sham...”
Ben’s stereoscopic photographs split the left and right eye, bringing them together through the viewfinder that replicates the process of binocular vision, creating three-dimensional form from the still photographic images. The technology is not new, the process is straightforward, and Ben adds to the theatricality of the proposition of 3-D images but carefully choreographing his female subject, present in all the works, heightening the potential of the device through choreographing the camera angle to make her levitate, or objects float. This structural intervention also underpins Seung Woo Back’s work, carefully aligning the sight registrations of miniature buildings, in the foreground, so that they form seamless landscapes with actual tower blocks and apartment buildings in the far distance. Hyung-Geun Park draws on a different strategy of displacement, drawing on the unlikely with the natural environment that alludes to a fake that we feel familiar with and therefore begin to read it as such. These works document, but I think that their documentation draws social and cultural readings that are more deeply set at a subconscious or secondary level. Seung Woo Back’s theme park photographs of Western buildings certainly draw on ideas of the international cultural currency of social agenda within a Korea fast developing into a Nation far removed from its historical past. Likewise Ben Judd’s stereoscopic photographs, with their period viewers, resonate at a certain degree through a Victorian past, evoking mystery, illusion, and séance.
AR: Ben Judd one of the British artists in the exhibition is best known for his undercover videos of specific groups of people, I guess that may ring true for his work, but how about the others?
AR: Yes, in Ben’s work there is a very strong link to issues of documentation, and this certainly stretches through the works that you talk about, such as, I Miss (2003), and, I Love (2003), into the new film that is being shown here, I Will Heal You (2007). This work has the most direct links to documentation, alongside the piece Mal Gusto (2007) by Kate and Eloise. While it documents aspects of a residency in Colombia earlier in the year, and contains footage of meetings he had with local people, it steps beyond documentation and in this sense is not documentary. The documented encounters with the varying people that Ben met with, vanguards of their own very specialised belief systems, witches, parapsychologists, scientologists, are vehicles within the narrative of the work that is constructed along an altogether different set of agendas. Following on from L. Ron Hubbord’s infamous video promoting Scientology, Ben came to consider his piece as the promotional video for the Movement he created.
AR: I remember Eloise Fornieles' performance The Oyster Bar, for her graduation show at the Slade a few years back, where people were invited to exchange a tale of loss for an oyster or orange. I am intrigued as to how her collaboration with Kate Hawkins which resulted in the film, Mal Gusto relates to the other work in the show. The work deals with etiquette and hostility and the superficiality of the art private view. I presume you will be exhibiting the still images from the performance?
CD: This is an interesting case in point, and maybe it answers more thoroughly your question about documentation. The stills from the performance are not being shown. The conception of the work was always that would stand independently as a film work, and maybe this was always to do with questioning conceptions of documentary. The piece was originally conceived as a performance and was performed in Tel Aviv in 2005. In reconsidering the work for this show there were a number of options. A performance was one. Kate & Eloise decided that in reconsidering the work it was an opportunity to stretch its own possibilities, and mediating the terrain between performance and film, through a middle ground of documentation, I consider being a bold and interesting proposition.
The work in one sense documents the performance that took place at Paradise Row, but within this it becomes something other, a film. It was conceived for film, filmed and edited accordingly, so the fact that it documents a performance becomes secondary to its status as a film or video work. Retaining such a direct connection, through the fact of it being a performance that exists within the context of a performance, that of the oft perceived ‘superficiality of the private view’ to which you refer, makes it all the resonant in drawing it into a different realm, one that sits outside documentation. Like all the works there are multiple layers, social and cultural codes are wrapped up within the works, and so extending the ‘fiction and conceit’ of Kate & Eloise’s performance through another layer of media, into film, is a wholly relevant and I hope rewarding gesture.
AR: I think that it is interesting and important that Hyung-Geun Park's photographs are included in a show which investigates photography. He has been interested in landscape photography - a traditional field - for some years but as I understand it his practice investigates the fact that reality is not the same as perception and as such his work can be seen as being filtered through his imagination. Was this indeed an important consideration when selecting his work for the exhibition?
I worked collaboratively on this project with I-MYU Projects (Jeongae Im and Enbock Yu) and both Hyung-Geun Park and Seung Woo Back were artists that Jeongae and Eunice introduced me to when we first started talking about the project. I had seen Hyung-Geun Park’s work before and was aware of Seung Woo Back’s Real World series, but this was the first time that I started looking at their work in real depth.
I think your reading of Hyung-Geun’s practice, as being concerned with a discrepancy between perception and reality, is exactly right, and although that could be considered as sounding straightforward, I think it is far from that, and that interestingly it underpins many of the ideas that I have attempted to talk about, from the paradox of photography as a medium, to the artists collective adoption of structural devices to simultaneously manipulate and retain truthful order.
The understated temperament of Hyung-Geun Park’s photographs I find exceptionally compelling, I think for me from the works that we are showing Two Trees characterises most readily the cutting romance of his practice that informs this stopgap between actuality and failing perception. The works are in many ways are very difficult to place, I like this fact, there is an unknowingness to engaging with them. I think this informs my interest in drawing works together that function beyond themselves, through perceptual, unarticulated schemas, that draw a proposition of viewing that is something other. To the left of the door is the largest photograph being shown, Paper Horse by Hyung-Geun Park. This work cuts an immediate line of communication with Kate & Eloise’s film, shown on a flatscreen across the room. The connection between these two pieces sits outside of media, scale or content. It sits elsewhere, correct and complete, but somewhere aside from words.
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Exhibition ended
Abandoned Protocol
Ritter/Zamet, London / 1 favourite