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LUCY RAVEN EDGE OF TOMORROW 8 December 2016 – 12 February 2017 Serpentine Gallery
This winter, the Serpentine presents the first UK solo exhibition of the New York-based artist, Lucy Raven (born 1977, Tucson, Arizona). Raven’s work focuses on the marginal spaces at the edges of image production, what happens behind the camera or between the frames of a film or animation. She follows the production of copper wire from an open pit mine in the American West to a smelter in southern China in China Town (2009). She observes post-production technicians converting Hollywood films to 3D in Chennai, India, linking the digitally created illusion of depth to ancient Indian bas-reliefs in The Deccan Trap (2015). She describes spaces and people on the outskirts of Kingston, New York in the hand-drawn animation I Felt As If I Had Actually Been To China (2007). This shift of focus from the image to its production encourages interrogation of the kind of imagery that has become all too familiar. Raven’s exhibition will bring together a diverse selection of works in a site-specific installation within the spaces of the Gallery. At the heart of the exhibition, a cinematic space will feature the animated film Curtains (2014), in which a series of still stereoscopic images converge and diverge,
becoming momentarily three-dimensional when viewed through anaglyph 3D glasses. Over the course of the exhibition, this space will play host to a series of film evenings programmed by Raven. The question of time is paramount throughout the installation, which incorporates Raven’s own work as well as a selection of objects that relate to it. From the slow-moving beams of the installation Casters (2016) to the flickering of film projection test patterns that form a looping visual score in the 35mm film RP31 (2012), time experienced in the gallery is measured in frames and repetitions. Serpentine Winter Season Showing concurrently at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery is the work of the late architect Zaha Hadid, presenting her rarely seen paintings, drawings – including calligraphy drawings which would later be transformed into architecture. Lucy Raven and Zaha Hadid are unified by their unique approach to creating space, be it through the visionary art and architecture of Hadid or Raven’s moving image installations, which traverse the gap between two and three dimensionality. For press information contact: Nancy Groves, [email protected] +44 (0)20 7298 1544 V Ramful, [email protected], +44 (0)20 7298 1519 Press images at serpentinegalleries.org/press Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA Serpentine Sackler Gallery, West Carriage Drive, Kensington Gardens, London W2 2AR Image Credit: Curtains, 2014 Anaglyph video installation, 5.1 sound 50 mins, looped
LUCY RAVEN
SERPENTINE GALLERY
8 DECEMBER 2016 – 12 FEBRUARY 2017
LIST OF WORKS
Unless otherwise stated all works are courtesy of Lucy Raven and Pilar Corrias Gallery
South Gallery
Small East Gallery
Lucy Raven
Casters 2016
Mixed media
69 x 165 x 42 cm (each part 69 x 69 x 42cm)
Lucy Raven
Shape Notes 2016
Photographic animation, colour, sound, 3:09 min, looped
Commissioned and produced by Calder Foundation, New York,
in collaboration with Victoria Brooks
Alexander Calder, Chef d’orchestre, 1966
Copyright 2016 Calder Foundation, New York, all rights reserved.
Earle Brown, Calder Piece, 1963-66
Copyright 2016 Earle Brown Music Foundation.
Performed by Talujon Percussion Quartet on 9 January 2016 at
Friends Seminary, New York.
East Gallery
North Gallery
Lucy Raven
The Deccan Trap 2015
Photographic animation, colour, sound,
4:19 min, looped
Lucy Raven
Curtains 2014
Anaglyph 3D video installation, colour, 5.1
sound, 50min, looped
Lucy Raven
China Town 2009
Photographic animation, colour, sound,
51:30 min
Lucy Raven
I Felt As If I Had Actually Been To China 2007
Hand-drawn animation, colour, sound, 2:29 min
West Gallery
Small West Gallery
Lucy Raven
RP31 2012
35mm film installation, colour, 4:48min,
looped
Eve Arnold
Montgomery Clift, Clark Gable and Eli Wallach
roping a wild horse during the filming of The
Misfits, Nevada USA 1960
Black and white photograph
35.5 x 54 cm
Exhibition print copyright Eve Arnold/Magnum
Photos
The Grantchester Pottery
Overwhelmed by emotion. She lost control. #2
2016
Glazed stoneware, hemp cord, stainless steel
fixings and tears
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist
Aby Warburg
Pueblo Indian pottery on a plinth, Santa Fe,
January 1896 1896
Black and white photograph
8.4 x 8.4 cm
Courtesy of The Warburg Institute, London
Walker Evans
Squeakie asleep (Othel Lee Burroughs). Son of a
Hale County, Alabama cotton sharecropper 1936
Black and white photograph
54.4 x 36 cm
Exhibition print copyright Library of Congress,
Washington DC
Anne Low
Untitled 2016
Handwoven linen, hand-forged nail
68.6 x 68.6 cm
Courtesy of the artist
Berenice Abbott
Magnetic field reaches in all directions
1958–61
Black and white photograph
74 x 63.5 cm
Exhibition print copyright Berenice
Abbott/Getty Images
Oskar Fischinger
34 Ton Ornamente 1932
Celluloid
45 x 20 cm
Courtesy of the Deutsches Filminstitut,
Frankfurt am Main / Collection Oskar
Fischinger
Phil Tippett
Work in Progress 2016
Mixed media
40.6 × 61 cm
Courtesy of the artist
I like the fact that discontinuities – things that happen between the capture of single frames (preparations, distractions, naps, new ideas) – have the potential to present a sort of ghost story in the gap between onscreen images.1Lucy Raven
Lucy Raven’s work focuses on the spaces at the edges of analogue and digital image production, what happens behind the camera or between the frames of a film or animation. This shift of focus from the properties of the image to the mode of its production encourages interrogation of the kind of imagery that has become all too familiar in broadcast media.
Raven’s exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery is not the first time we have worked with her; in 2012, she was part of the group project China Power Station and in 2015, she contributed to the Leon Golub exhibition catalogue. It is timely that so many key works are included in her first solo show in the UK, and these are presented throughout the galleries in a site-specific installation. She has also sought out artworks, objects and archival materials that expand upon the ideas and research inflecting her own pieces, including Berenice Abbott, Eve Arnold, Walker Evans, Oskar Fischinger, Arthur Jafa, Anne Low, The Grantchester Pottery, Phil Tippett and Aby Warburg. Alongside her own moving image projections, she has also selected an extraordinary film programme, which will feature previously unseen footage from Phil Tippett and Arthur Jafa.
At the nexus of this networked constellation is a set of relation-ships that address the way that time is recorded and experienced; through objects, in the body, and via images. Raven is interested in the interconnected gaps within this triple juncture, such as the invisible moments between frames within a stop-motion animation, the transferable value between an object and its viewer, or the extension of the body through technological prostheses.
Conceived in parallel to Raven’s exhibition at the Serpentine, this artist’s book becomes a direct continuation of her working methods through its collaborative format and multifaceted structure. Bringing together a series of commissioned texts, visual essays, stills, and film notes, the voices contained here examine time and the image from a multitude of perspectives.
We are truly indebted to Raven for her dedication and enthusiasm in creating this ambitious exhibition and publication. We also thank her for agreeing to produce a beautiful Limited Edition work.
The many contributors to the book, whose different voices provide great insight into Raven’s practice, have been most generous with their time and expertise and we are very grateful to them. We also thank the designers, Giles Round and Roland Brauchli, for their time and commitment in producing a beautiful extension of Raven’s exhibition.
There are a number of organisations and individuals whose help and involvement have been essential to this project. Rebekka Seubert has been an invaluable support in the research and installation of the exhibition and we thank her. We also thank the generous lenders to the exhibition: the Deutsches Filminstitut, Frankfurt am Main/Collection Oskar Fischinger, Arthur Jafa, Anne Low, Phil Tippett, The Grantchester Pottery and The Warburg Institute, London.
The Rosenkranz Foundation has provided key support and we are most grateful to them. The Lucy Raven Exhibition Circle, including
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FOREWORDHans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic DirectorYana Peel, CEO
76
those donors who wish to remain anonymous, has provided vital assistance. Special thanks go to Pilar Corrias Gallery whose contribution has enabled us to realise this publication. We are also delighted to be continuing our partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies on Serpentine’s Digital Engagement Platform, who enable us to widen the reach of our audiences. Our advisors AECOM and Weil offer their exceptional expertise to help us realise the ambitions of the artists we work with and we thank them.
The public funding that the Serpentine receives through Arts Council England provides an important support towards all of the Galleries’ work and we remain very appreciative of their ongoing commitment.
The continued success of the Galleries is made possible thanks to the Council of the Serpentine, an extraordinary group that provides essential ongoing contributions. The Americas Foundation, The Learning Council, Patrons, Future Contemporaries and Benefactors are also key supporters of the Serpentine’s programme and we thank them.
Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the remarkable Serpentine team: Lizzie Carey-Thomas, Head of Programmes; Rebecca Lewin, Exhibitions Curator; Joseph Constable, Assistant Curator; Mike Gaughan, Gallery Manager; and Joel Bunn, Installation and Production Manager. All have worked closely with the wider Serpentine Galleries staff to realise this project and we are most grateful for their hard work and enthusiasm.
1 Lucy Raven, in ‘Time as Material’, with Joan Jonas, Ken Okiishi, Jennifer West, moderated by Filipa Ramos, issue 47, Mousse Magazine (http://moussemagazine.it/articolo.mm?id=1272, accessed 24 September 2016).
A certain kind of asymmetry – two things that combine, not to mirror each other, but to induce a consciousness of where and how they are joined, and in so doing producing a third type of image or experience – underscores the structures of Raven’s exhibition, this book, and the ideas at the heart of the project as a whole. In the gallery, which is architecturally completely symmetrical, each space has been altered, either subtly or dramatically, to respond to the demands and possible effects of the work installed in it. This publication, meanwhile, has three distinct sections. It begins with film notes that discuss each of the works by Raven included in the exhibition, and ends with text and images that elucidate a variety of approaches to the key components of film production: the relationship of the body to the camera; costume and the body as prostheses of one another; the technical structures built by photographers to help them produce their images; a score that suggests the physical and emotional affect of sound; the techniques employed in stop-frame animation; the capture of the human form or objects in motion, and the gap between the pro-duction of art or film and how it is read by its viewers. Inserted into the centre of both the exhibition and the publication is Raven’s selection of feature films, animations, shorts, and computer graphics that work as a lexicon of moving image practice.This asymmetry is also crucial in understanding Raven’s approach
to the central theme of the project: time. Time as we experience it in seconds and minutes on a clock, and as we experience it in front of a film – especially a film by Raven – can be very different. Crucially, none of her moving image works purport to represent ‘real’ move-ment by filming her subjects, but are rather constructed from a series of still photographs that operate according to a set of rules or processes applied later. Raven’s approach to animation is post- production stripped back to its most basic elements, the still image or single frame, and the artistry of the animator. In this way, the ‘finished’ film exists at a point within a continuum of moving image production, one end of which might be a live news broadcast, with the other a 3D film created frame-by-frame from 2D footage.Works like Casters (2016) or Curtains (2014) stretch and compress
time by playing on our expectations, anticipating and delaying the moment when two slowly-rotating lights will cross over, or when two versions of the same image converge inexorably to create one in momentary and surprising 3D. In RP31 (2012) the initially over-whelming flickering of images resolves into a rhythmic searching of the eye for repetition or rest, while in China Town (2009) the juddering sequence of still images, never achieving the speed of twenty-four frames-per-second that is standardly used to produce the illusion of ‘real’ movement, is a constant reminder of the physical structure of film. Similarly, the ‘wild sync’ used in the hand-drawn animation I Felt As If I Had Actually Been To China (2007) and in Shape Notes (2016) highlights the dissociation between still images and the continuous soundtrack. Lastly, time has all but collapsed in The Deccan Trap (2015); the slow movement of geological time is paralleled in the painstaking work of the post-production technicians on every frame of a 3D film. In this publication, Raven’s various timescales are represented
in the treatment of still images. Where the movement of Raven’s animations are slow, the images in the book change only gradually from one page to the next. Where the sequences are made up of multiple frames, or where the work contains multiple sequences,
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INTRODUCTIONRebecca Lewin
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the number of images per page increases. The resulting effect is that of a series of flip books, creating a parallel between the linear time of the film strip and the book.Time can also be embedded in objects in multiple ways, woven
into a piece of cloth in Anne Low’s fabric form, recorded as an accumulation of objects aggregated over the course of a year in Phil Tippett’s pendant, used to harden clay into ceramic in The Grantchester Pottery’s mobile, to play a Ton Ornamente by Oskar Fischinger, develop a photographic print by Eve Arnold, Berenice Abbott or Walker Evans, or contracted into an instant in Arthur Jafa’s self-portrait. They are held by and hold within themselves a moment in time that is endlessly alluring by dint of the continued survival of the object, which is itself made talismanic by the compression of the time that has been spent on their production. Like Raven’s films, they also shift in form as they are understood gradually, and over time – The Grantchester Pottery’s ceramic mobile, for example, might physically rotate before it resolves from abstract forms into the key components of a face. Arnold’s image could be read as an unstaged moment, or a film still, before the fringing of the sunshade in the corner of the photograph suggests that she is positioned behind the film camera of a location shoot (she was one of several photographers docu-menting The Misfits in Nevada in 1960).However, neither the exhibition nor the publication is intended
as a mirror of the other. Nor are these distinct elements brought together in order to expose previously hidden mechanics or thought. Rather, the conglomeration of images, spaces and times within Raven’s own work, and of a multitude of forms and voices within the project as a whole, presents an attempt to understand the world and the images produced by it in an archaeological, rather than interpretative, manner. Foucault declared, in Archaeology of Knowledge, that:Archaeology… does not try to grasp the moment in which the oeuvre emerges on the anonymous horizon. It does not wish to rediscover the enigmatic point at which the individual and the social are inverted into one another. It is neither a psychology, nor a sociology, nor more generally an anthropology of creation… It is not a return to the innermost secret of the origin; it is the systematic description of a discourse object. 1
An archaeology of sorts has also been employed by Raven, both in the metaphorical unearthing of the objects by Fischinger, Tippett et al., and in the research that has resulted in her own works. The painstaking collection of test card images over the course of several years in order to produce RP31, and the observation of a quarry as it exhumes layers of mineral ore in China Town are just two examples. The use of black velvet throughout the installation is another;
it is not simply a display feature, nor is it only practical (as a space divider or sound buffer). It is also a nod to early animation and visual effects practices, in which filmmakers would photograph their models against a background of light-absorbent black velvet to eliminate shadows and assist with the superimposition of the model over live footage. Against this context, there is no hierarchy of form separating the different kinds of images in the exhibition. Raven’s photographic animations and the still photographs and objects are all simultaneously static and animated, if not by technology, then by our movement around them and changing apprehension of them.
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Raven’s re-presentation to the viewer of processes and labour that are always already happening is not only revelatory in its approach, it is also political in its effect, creating a consciousness in the viewer of the simultaneous passage of time in the projection space and in the ‘real’ world. This simultaneity collapses the distance between time passing ‘there’ (during the production of materials or movies) and time passing ‘here’ (spent in watching the film in a cinema or art gallery).This collapse became suddenly evident, historically, with the
invention of the camera and the telephone and the ability of both technologies to provide an instantaneous transmission of knowl-edge between places and peoples. The art historian Aby Warburg, who travelled through some of the remoter areas of North America in 1895–96, took copious notes and photographs of the people, objects and rituals that he encountered (part of these records is represented within Raven’s exhibition). In the concluding pages of a lecture that he produced from these notes, he remarked, ‘Telegram and telephone destroy the cosmos. Mythical and symbolic thinking strive to form spiritual bonds between humanity and the surround-ing world, shaping distance into the space required for devotion and reflection: the distance undone by the instantaneous electric connection.’2 Theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord, writing in 1967, decried a contemporary society that ‘eliminates geographical distance only to reap distance internally in the form of spectacular separation.’3 The joins in Raven’s work – in the bringing together of images within her animations, or the collating of objects and voices in her exhibition and this book – are perhaps a kind of protest against the alienation that Warburg warned against, and Debord later observed. Turning her gaze on this space and its erosion reminds us of our separation from the landscapes, structures and processes that produce contemporary urban life and that produce contemporary images.It is also significant that the gaps between artist’s film, feature
film, animation, performance, black box, cinema and art gallery, are collapsed within Raven’s practice and in the spaces of the Serpentine Gallery exhibition. All of these forms coexist, circling the central space, in which a structure that echoes the formal arrange-ments of a cinema has been installed. The presence of cinema within a white cube gallery is always fraught with tension, and an awareness of its having already been alienated from its spiritual and phenomenological home. However, Raven’s treatment of the gallery as a formal procession through specific kinds of cinematic spaces again provides an archaeological rather than interpretative understanding of the semiotics of these spaces. The encounter with Casters in the first room of the gallery can be read against the context of that signifier of the red carpet premiere, the searchlights of Hollywood. Opposite this space, Raven’s new work
1 Michel Foucault, transl. A.M. Sheridan Smith, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972) pp.139–40.2 Aby Warburg, transl. Michael P. Steinberg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997) p.54.3 Guy Debord, transl. Donald Nicholson-Smith, ‘Separation Perfected’, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), paragraph 7.
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Shape Notes records a performance of Earle Brown’s Chef d’orchestre, in which another historical object, a mobile by Alexander Calder, is used as one of many percussion instruments. Each gallery leading away from these rooms becomes a black box within the gallery, in which the mechanics of the projection (in RP31) or of the post-production studios in Chennai, India (in The Deccan Trap) are made visible. And at the heart of the building, the cinema built primarily to show Curtains will also project periodic viewings of China Town and I Felt As If I Had Actually Been To China, and weekly screenings of film programmes selected by Raven. In this way, even the most complex intervention into the gallery space – a structure that purports to the grandeur of a cinema – is not satisfied in becoming a monument to a single work, but reminds us instead of the temporality of the films on show. The exhibition, this publication, and the ideas that underpin
both present a careful unpacking of the labour and time taken to create images that apparently exist outside of our immediate present. However, this process is not intended as a criticism of the possibilities and imaginaries produced by film. Rather, Raven’s efforts have the effect of creating a series of openings. Her crosshairs (to borrow an element from Casters) are trained on the edges, on the marginal and on the unseen of film and its attendant industries. The title of the exhibition, Edge of Tomorrow, points to this metaphorically – drawing our attention to the ideas just delineated – and literally – in relation to the film of the same name from 2014, which revolves around the repe- tition and manipulation of time, and which uses the same kind of post production techniques that Raven shows us in several of her works. By focusing on a specific moment or element, or by simply acknowledging other voices and practices along-side her own, we are asked to review the way we consume images, within multiple types of legitimised spaces and through different materials, and we do so in such a way that reconnects us to the world beyond the screen.
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CASTERS2016mixed media69 × 219.3 × 42 cm
16
Rotocasters are used to produce hollow three-dimensional objects; their ability to rotate as the resin hardens ensures that the cast sets evenly. Casters casts no object, but rather quite the opposite: an immaterial beam that roams the void of the room. The hollow cast gives way to light cast across space, coating wall, floor, and ceiling in complete ignorance of any hierarchy between them, denying the horizon of the proscenium. The white light indulges in the undifferentiated potentiality of the full spectrum, never settling – or setting, to return to the vocabulary of the rotocaster – into an image of discrete colours. Watch closely in La Région Centrale and it is possible to catch an occasional glimpse of a shadow cast across the landscape by the apparatus holding the camera. In Casters, this indexical trace of the circumstances of production is unyielding: the beams are forever bisected by umbral lines that cross each lamp. Distilling Raven’s interest in stereoscopy down to absolute, abstracted fundamentals, the blind eyes of Casters stage an encounter between vision and machine of deceptive simplicity and unassuming complexity.
Erika Balsom
To see one’s own sight means visible blindness.Robert Smithson
You are here, the film is there, it is neither fascism nor entertainment.Michael Snow
The machine for seeing: it traces a line from nineteenth-century philosophical toys through to the work of Lucy Raven, with a few stops in between. To create his Enantiomorphic Chambers (1965), Smithson used blue painted steel and mirrors to draw the viewer into a confrontation with the binocularity of vision that cancels her own reflection. In La Région Centrale (1971), Snow captured the wilderness of Québec by mounting a 16mm film camera on a robotic arm able to execute pre-programmed, dizzy-ing rotations. Both works, however different they may be, push at the limits of our embodied vision by engaging with technical apparatuses that denature the act of seeing and confound habitual distinctions between flatness and depth. So, too, does Casters.
The experiments of Smithson and Snow are crucial intertexts for this sculptural installa-tion of two 575-watt bulbs mounted within blue aluminium rotocasters that closely recall the form of the Enantiomorphic Chambers. Employing technology developed for use in anti-aircraft artillery, as Snow had before her, Raven choreographs the movement of these lights in 360-degree rotations around a black-ened room, with each forming the figure of eight of infinity. Whereas Snow’s camera somersaulted in the moment of production, Raven displaces this gesture to the moment of reception and doubles it. In an act of icono-clastic reduction, she offers no image – simply naked beams of light that ask one to reflect on the act of projection at its most elemental, while preserving a faint echo of the spotlights of entertainment spectacle. The patient beams penetrate the spaceless darkness, selectively restoring volume as they form intersecting circles. Like the images of Curtains (2015), which resolve into a three-dimensional illusion only for an instant before moving out of alignment and once more into flatness, the lights of Casters cross just momentarily. These two mechanical eyes, to take up the metaphor of vision proposed by the pupil-like dots at the centre of the beams, otherwise resist the synthesis on which our depth perception depends. Instead, they return us to the corpo-real fact of binocularity, so easily forgotten.
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pictorial punctuations. Employing a tech-nique related to her earlier piece China Town (2009), here Raven constructs her reaction from still rather than moving images, a process that emphasises the reality that in animation, sound and image are not naturally synchronised, even when the subject matter is concrete and not concocted. The clustered imagery playfully focuses in on details that bring us closer to the sounds, if not their literal moment of creation. In Shape Notes, it is not a matter of displacing sound and image to create abstraction, but working from separate elements to fabricate a sense of cohesion.
Andrew Lampert
Earle Brown (1926–2002) was a central figure of the mid-twentieth century ‘New York School’, alongside John Cage, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff, and his graphically de- vised open scores often relied on visual means rather than standard notation to convey the sonic parameters of his compositions. Containing everything from detailed textual instructions to droves of dashed squiggles, his question-raising scores must truly be transformed by the performers into sound. In Brown’s work the conductor plays a vital role, because it is their ordering of the score’s musical materials that shapes the character and qualities a piece takes in performance. As a result, realisations of Brown’s indeterminate music can greatly differ even though the compositions are, on paper at least, the same each time.
Chef d’orchestre (1963–66), a rarely pre-sented collaboration with Alexander Calder, calls for a percussion quartet to be conducted by a behemoth fourteen-part mobile that is also intermittently struck like a gong. The score indicates that the ‘percussion section should be arranged in a full circle of instru-ments with the mobile in the center,’ and that the ‘overall sound effect is that of random, delicate, noisy activity.’ The rotations and fluctuations of Calder’s sculpture serve as conductor for the kinetic percussionists, who shuffle between nearly a hundred instruments while they mentally superimpose the mobile’s ever-changing physical form onto the score. The arrhythmic, tonally colourful clinks and crashes make sudden leaps between registers, and cacophonous moments are balanced with tentative silences. With such shifting dynamics and timbres at play it is easy to imagine the spirited music as being Foley sound for a kaleidoscopic abstract animation.
Avoiding what could easily evoke a visual free flurry, in Shape Notes Lucy Raven sticks to imagery of the percussion ensemble Tallujon performing Chef d’orchestre at the Friends Quaker Meeting House in New York City in 2016. Her short video is both a record of a concert and a work derived from, not beholden to, the actual recital. Selecting her images from nearly 3,500 photographs shot during both of the group’s shows, Raven found that, like the musicians, she needed to adopt a strategy to interpret Brown’s score. Rather than follow the motion of the mobile as her editorial guide, Raven lets the music conduct the visual beats of her
SHAPE NOTES2016photographic animation, colour, sound4 min
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So it is not only labour or only relief but also their twinned, conjoined realities that linger at the core of The Deccan Trap. This is further suggested by the film’s construction, with each frame worked on heavily by Raven herself. There are no single shots in the film; it is rather a composite of fragments of images collaged together in complex configu-rations, producing their own sense of depth. The Deccan Trap’s cut-and-paste arrange-ments seem to be performing a broken down version of the post-production process used in most Hollywood films today, but also recalls C.K. Rajan’s remarkable series of collages Mild Terrors, made in the mid-1990s to convey the delirium that was experienced in the country as India’s economy opened itself up to the vagaries of modern-day capitalism. Raven’s visual approach of un- expected clashes, bringing the modern and the pre-modern into close quarters, along with an ambient soundtrack, turns The Deccan Trap slightly surreal, and disconcert-ingly reflects some of the conditions of our everyday lived experience.
Shanay Jhaveri
The Deccan Plateau of south central India, a region rich in natural resources, has a history of spirited global interrelation, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Artists, poets, writers and merchants from all over the world made it to the Deccan; journeys that would lead to the co-mingling of aesthetics and the creation of some remarkable works of arts. Lucy Raven’s The Deccan Trap, captures another moment in the region’s ongoing involvement in a set of international exchanges, reflecting India’s place within the twenty-first century’s neoliberal, global economy.
The opening frames of The Deccan Trap are of present-day, chaotic Chennai, the capital of the Tamil Nadu region of south east India. Raven’s camera moves through its busy streets and soaring skyscrapers into the darkened offices of International Tech Park, where technicians are seen converting outsourced Hollywood films from 2D to 3D. They are creating volume from flat planes, taking images apart and moulding them around mesh forms that they have built by hand. We observe them work meticulously, frame by frame, before their constructed images give way to tangles of wires and blinking circuit boards. Then all of a sudden, The Deccan Trap arrives at Ellora. And equally suddenly, the ‘trap’ of the title explains itself; ‘trap’ has been used by geologists to describe rock formations, and Ellora, found in the western Deccan region, is home to one of the largest rock-cut monastery complexes in the world, dating from 600–1000 A.D.
With this swift edit, Raven shifts what could simply have been a documentation of outsourced labour – the global network that Hollywood now relies on for its post- production – into a more intriguing cultural consideration of the sustained attempts on the subcontinent to continually look beyond and behind the flat image. Raven specula-tively connects a historic moment with a contemporaneous one, threading together the carving and marking of the real land-scape of the Deccan to produce spatial depth with the achievements of the tech- nicians of International Tech Park in a virtual space. She points us towards the formal relationship between bas-relief sculptures and 3D images, both of which achieve an illusion of depth through a form of manual labour.
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THE DECCAN TRAP2015video, colour, sound4:19 min
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he said two things that really struck me. One was a quote from a Sinologist who once said: ‘If you spend a week in China, you could write a book on it. If you spend a month, you might be willing to write an essay. If you spend a year, you’d rather not write anything at all.’ Then, when Antonioni was asked about negative critical reviews, he said, ‘the whole endeavour was made worthwhile to me when I heard a woman coming out of the theater saying, “I felt as if I’d actually been to China.”’
Kevin McGarry
I Felt As If I Had Actually Been To China (2007) is a bit of a misnomer, because at the time of the short animation’s making, Raven had already been to China, not only in spirit but in actuality. In fact, she was reeling from the visit, attempting to unravel her first trip – made during the production of China Town (2009) – while stationed in Kingston, New York, a depressed town on the Hudson River, north of New York City and not far from the creative enclave of Bard College, where she was a student at the time.
Most would agree that Kingston peaked in 1777, when it became the capital of New York State and, following the Battle of Saratoga, was subsequently burned to the ground by the British. Raven’s hand-drawn animation compiles glimpses of modern- day Kingston as a hamlet beset by the most ordinary symptoms of global industry. A wooden welcome sign denoting historical significance is dwarfed by monolithic mar-quees for fast food and gas. A main street dollar store with quaint bay windows is full of junk likely produced in China: off-brand toothpaste, sneakers, and wildly emblazoned caps. A bored woman, temples to palm to elbow to counter, runs a restaurant called ‘Great Wall’ in a sleepy strip mall. Cutaways to municipal prospectors and salvage yards depict a place which is provisionally dedi-cated to its own upkeep, while it has clearly already become a repository for detritus from afar.
The combination of synaptic, dissociating stop-motion, anchored in the real by radio broadcasts of union negotiations and location recordings taken inside the Chinese restaurant and the dollar store, was a prototype for formal strategies expanded upon in China Town. However, there is a stark visual contrast between the latter’s story, told in frequently sublime, full-colour photographs, and the mood of I Felt As If I Had Actually Been To China, like an abject sandbox of crude ink sketches.
Kingston 2007 represented dual displa- cements for Raven: the physical distance between the experience of a month spent in China, as well as the space in which she edited the work. This distance did, however, enable her to reconcile her field work as material. In reference to these kinds of displacements, she has recounted Antonioni’s remarks on critics’ dislike of his documentary Chung Kuo, Cina (1972):
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I FELT AS IF I HAD ACTUALLY BEEN TO CHINA2007video, colour, sound2:29 min
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China Town recalls other notable recent films like Steve McQueen’s Gravesend (2007), a film that considers the mining and process-ing of coltan, a precious metal used in the manufacture of micro-electric parts used in laptops and mobile phones, or Allan Sekula and Noël Burch’s majestic film The Forgotten Space (2010), which investigates the invisible, displaced labour of the global maritime trade. Raven’s photographic animation adds a rich ingredient to this important trajectory in documentary approaches by artists. As her work continues to examine emerging cinematic technologies and the increasing pervasiveness of animation, it also considers the human body’s place within the apparatus of image production. Her acute attention to the conjunction of time, material, mechanics, and labour offers an important critical van-tage point as the animation and reanimation of life by new technologies and economic forces becomes all-consuming.
Stuart Comer
1 Lucy Raven and Fionn Meade, ‘Anamorphic Materialism’, Mousse, issue 31, November 2011, p.140.
Returning to consider Lucy Raven’s 2009 film China Town in light of more recent projects, it now stands as an important structural achievement undergirding her subsequent investigations into the labour forces, trans-national exchanges, and machine optics behind our increasingly virtual gaze. It pre-pares the ground for her broader investigation into the intricate links between the global economy and the direct impact its sweeping transformations have on how – and what – we see. The film also bears witness to Raven’s own labour, giving detailed visual form to her rigorous research process.
The premise of China Town is straight- forward enough. With a nod to the hydro- political struggles at the centre of the California water wars featured in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974 ), Raven’s film widens the lens to take in the international copper economy that has transformed trade in the Pacific Rim. Her specific focus is the production of copper wire, a central component in the circuitry at the heart of global communication networks, and the electrification of major infrastructural projects, like the immense Three Gorges Dam in central China. China Town carefully observes the cycle of production, detailing the extraction of raw copper ore from a pit mine in Nevada and its subsequent transformation to wire at a smelter in China. The soundtrack consists of ambient field recordings made separately at the same sites. The film is rich in details, highlighting the material facts behind immaterial economies, shining a light on workers, scarred industrial landscapes and the machines that power these operations.
Drawing on the history of ‘photo films’ like Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), Raven developed a unique approach to photo-graphic animation for China Town. The film is constructed from more than 7,000 still photographs, creating a stuttering, jittering effect at odds with a culture defined by limitless image streams, the unflinching eye of the CCTV camera, and the seamless, liquid surfaces of high definition camerawork. The twitching of each image seems to echo the actual movement of the human eye, and constructs a unique temporal sensibility. Explaining the strategy of this method, Raven comments: ‘By slowing down the moving parts and breaking up the flow of images and sound, I tried to better see and hear how the process operates.’1
CHINA TOWN2009photographic animation, colour, sound51:30 min
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We might say that the division of film into individual frames is a colonising of space-time. The illusion of motion, when produced from still images, demands that experience be subdivided into a specific number frames per second, twenty-four for example, separated by intervals of nothingness. The mind leans on these zones of interstitial black to settle the difference between adjacent frames, and in its efforts, comes up with the notion of movement. Which is to say, the industry of cinema regulates and subdivides time in order to mass-produce and distribute a spectacular time. With Curtains, Raven both points to and works against this colo- nising disposition by producing a place for thinking within a lattice of protracted suspense. We await the red-blue super- positions, each a fleeting, somatic nod to the transnational enterprise of fabricating dimension.
Deborah Stratman
1 The title of this essay is excerpted from T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Hollow Men’, especially: ‘Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow.’2 ‘There was a darkness; then a dizzy, sickening sensation of sight that was not like seeing; I saw a Line that was no Line; Space that was not Space: I was myself, and not myself. When I could find voice, I shrieked aloud in agony, “Either this is madness or it is Hell.” “It is neither,” calmly replied the voice of the Sphere, “it is Knowledge; it is Three Dimensions: open your eye once again and try to look steadily.” ’ Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions ( London: Seeley & Co., 1884).3 Jay Griffiths, A Sideways Look at Time (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher / Penguin, 2004 ), p.192.
Falls the Shadow 1
The fixed gap that exists between our two pupils is, on average, sixty millimetres. In trying to reconcile the slight but resolute disparity between these tandem views, our brain produces the concept of depth. We can say that the gap is the difference that makes a difference. Given a void, the mind scrambles to fill it because the void is the place where reason fails. It’s the blind spot that makes reason retreat to another dimension – to the dimension of thinking, for which the indeterminate is a necessity.2
In Curtains, two images, one blue, the other red-shifted, slowly approach, fuse, then separate along the horizontal plane. When the two images are just shy of fusion, one experiences a kind of brain-bifurcating wiggle from the frustrated effort of recon-ciling difference. Then, at the moment of coalescence, we experience a depth charge where the ocular universe jolts and expands, and everything that came before seems a flatland. The combination is not an additive sum, but a multiplicative product – a value of another dimension. Each time those red and blue images coalesce, we get a pheno- menological anchor for an artwork that is in all other respects intent on scrutinising the manufacturing of an image.
Toronto, Vancouver, London, Los Angeles, Chennai, Mumbai, Beijing – urban hosts in a wide net of production nodes to which the fabrication of images is outsourced. Lucy Raven’s camera extracts still frames from these global office sites, where the common denominator is a seated worker whose underutilised corpus labours before a computer screen on yet another static frame. In effect, Curtains offers up a divided stasis (of both the filmic frame and the worker’s body) in the ulterior service of careening, simulated embodiment and extra-dimensional profit.
In ancient China, when those in power colonised a new region, it was said the people there ‘received the calendar’. In Papua New Guinea, the colonial era was referred to as taim bilong masta (‘time belong master’).3 One could hardly conceive a more succinct epithet for the surrender of an idiosyncratic, local, indigenous time to that of a synchro-nised industrial capital. Subjecting people to a new measure of time is one of the more subtly profound aspects of imperialist power because it represents a colonising of the mind.
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CURTAINS2014anaglyph video installation, 5.1 sound50 min looped
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Beyond its thrilling opticality, RP31 functions as a sort of archive as well, idiosyncratically presented and preserved. There was no museum of test charts for Raven to explore, so she had to collect them gradually, from various film labs and projec-tion booths, and through this process she has directed our attention toward the work, vital yet relatively unheralded, that happens in those locations. She rescued fragments of film history– unwanted, obsolete– giving us a chance to consider them fully and, by extension, forcing us to reckon with the material life of images whose trajectories we might otherwise take for granted. This dimension of Raven’s work feels increasingly relevant to our present moment, a time when media circulates with unprecedented speed and ease, while its origins are all too often obscured.
Thomas Beard
How might the history of perception’s standardisation teach us new ways to see? This is a question that animates Lucy Raven’s installation RP31, a 35mm loop projected in a gallery space, with each frame being one of thirty-one different test patterns and calibration charts. These images were devel-oped by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), a global pro-fessional organisation that is also responsible for establishing the standards of countdown leaders and colour bars. The patterns are used by projectionists to service their equipment and to ensure proper framing, focus, and field steadiness during routine maintenance (the ‘RP’ of Raven’s title alludes to ‘recommended practices’), but Raven presents them in a style that liberates this ephemera from its earlier purpose.
The complex visual data of each chart, which varies widely from one to another, is often expressed via precisely delineated grids and concentric circles, hieroglyphs that would be legible to a technician and richly enigmatic to others. In RP31 these geometries mutate rapidly, zipping by at breakneck speed as numerous individual patterns give way to others in the space of a single second. The conspicuous presence of the projector in the gallery serves to heighten the work’s accelerated rhythms, providing a de facto soundtrack with the insistent staccato of its mechanical whir. Here we find the artist doubling down on a reflexive gamble: images never meant to be shown publicly and an apparatus typically absent from view are both out in plain sight.
At first the encounter overwhelms; the montage blisters forth. Yet before long viewers adjust their focus and become attuned to the composition’s design; this time it is the audience, not the machine, who recalibrates. Raven organised her constituent elements according to a precise score, mapping out the 6,947 frames in a manner that would allow for their stroboscopic alternation while also foregrounding individual pieces, giving each its moment of glory as it rises, flickering amongst the others, to the surface, and then recedes as the cycle continues. The heave and sigh of a parabolic cadence gives way to a steady pulse, but our eyes keep zooming in on the crosshair targets of the various calibration charts, reaching ever further into an illusion of the screen’s boundless depth.
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RP31201235mm film installation, colour4:48 min looped
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