Introduction Bakhtin and Moving Image Art

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2 Introduction Bakhtin and Moving Image Art In our enthusiasm for specification we have ignored questions of the interconnection and interdependence of various areas of culture; we have frequently forgotten that the boundaries of these areas are not absolute, that in various epochs they have been drawn in various ways; and we have not taken into account that the most intense and productive life of culture takes place on the boundaries of its individual areas and not in places where these areas have become enclosed in their own specificity. Mikhail Bakhtin 1 What is Mikhail Bakhtin s relevance to contemporary visual arts? Given the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary art practices, which more often than not blurs the boundaries between disciplines, genres and media, Bakhtin s ideas on the open-ended nature of cultural texts provides an important means of analyzing artistic works. In particular, his concept of the dialogic nature of text (i.e., the unfixed quality of the text that is never closed-off in advance but is always open to interpretation) is particularly apt for describing the strategies of many artists who seek to destabilize the authority of the text in cultural discourse by countering a text with their own artistic response. A Bakhtinian methodology is especially useful given the manner in which artists draw upon multiple genres and media in the creation of contemporary moving image art. 2 I use the term moving image as a means of addressing how contemporary artists make use of time-based media that can be projected (or displayed on television or computer screens) both inside and outside the museum. Because of the interconnections between the various areas of media culture there is an imprecise boundary between the numerous technologies of image reproduction as used by artists. This means that slides, photographs, television, film, analogue and digital video and even computer based images, though different media can be used together or set to other uses, resulting in a blurring of medial boundaries in the production of moving image art forms. In addition, the moving image

3 2 Introduction encompasses different categories or genres that are themselves uncertain and protean and in many cases overlap. Such is the case with Mona Hatoum s Corps Étranger (1994), which consists of a white cylinder encircling a projection on the floor of medical video footage filmed during endoscopic explorations of the artist s orifices and sound generated from recordings of her heart beating and other bodily sounds. In Hatoum s installation the boundaries between documentary and art, fiction and reality, body and object are intentionally blurred, highlighting how the distinctions between artistic media and genre are difficult to maintain as discrete categories. David Joselit challenges received notions of the stability of artistic media as objects of study and argues that we need to study particular image technologies, without artificially dividing them into a priori categories such as television and video art. 3 Hence, in addressing the instable nature of projected images the term moving image functions as a more inclusive term than that of television, video or film art. I am specifically interested in the permeable boundaries of moving image art, which has a fluid form that is constantly changing and finding new material configurations through the merging or blending of image-making practices that may make use of the same technology or travel from one media to another. The use of a Bakhtinian framework therefore parallels the interdisciplinary potential of moving image art, providing a less discipline-bound examination of art forms that defy a strict disciplinary or material categorization. My research problematic focuses on Bakhtin s dialogism to use Michael Holquist s term describing the different ways Bakhtin mediated on dialogue as a framework for examining contemporary moving image art forms. 4 What the artwork itself consists of is part of the discourse and provides an experimental and material framework that literally sets a stage for observers to aesthetically immerse their bodies and minds. A strategy employed by many contemporary artists is to construct an extended narrative by harnessing multiple media and forms and multi-voiced perspectives. This often entails making the means of production, the material and conceptual processes of art part of the artwork. Since the 1960s artists have put the technology being used on display as a means of examining the formal language of moving image art. Nam June Paik s Magnet TV (1965) consists of a large magnet placed on top of a television monitor; the result is an exploration of the image making potential of television and the material qualities of the television set itself as a replacement for traditional media. In Reel Time (1973) Annabel Nicolson looped film around the space of a room, through a film projector and a sewing machine, projecting the perforations made by the sewing machine onto a screen. The material movement of the filmstrip through the viewing space, the projector and the sewing machine oper-

4 Bakhtin and Moving Image Art 3 ated by Nicolson continued until the film broke from the repeated puncturing of the needle; the artwork is itself the material interaction of all these durational elements. Both Paik and Nicolson s moving image artworks defy media-based or disciplinary categories of what an artwork is, for both the artwork consists of its mode of production and the unconventional interactions between material and conceptual forms as experienced by embodied observers at a particular location in space and time. The body is a key component in many moving image installations, which often depend upon the embodied observer to navigate and experience the multisensorial installations in which they are immersed. Runa Islam s filmic installations are deliberately left open to the subjective interpretation of observers and their embodied perceptions of the fictions and realities that she juxtaposes. Her artwork cannot be read only through the formal aspects of film because, as she states, I don t make my works with all the meaning explicitly labeled, as I m not out to succeed to make something that I predetermine the outcome of the work can be read in a way by the reader and written in another way by the writer. 5 Her installations typically examine the material qualities of film, sound and sculpture by collapsing the boundaries between cinema and art. In Islam s The Restless Subject (2008) an S-shaped wooden partition, constructed by Tobias Putrih, rises to the ceiling and surrounds the installation. The bottom of the S encircles a looped film projector, a window cut into the wood allows it to project onto a suspended translucent screen, which is isolated in the top half of the S. The film itself consists of a mechanical thaumatrope being turned by a hand that is visible at times. A bird is painted on one side of the thaumatrope while on the other side are the bars of a cage. The soundtrack consists of archival recordings of birds from two different sources. As the title suggests, an intrinsic component of the installation is the constantly moving body of the observer who subjectively walks around the simple illusion of a chirping bird in a cage. The moving image thus created is one that depends upon the movement of observers around the partition, the film projector and the suspended screen; like the thaumatrope which is operated by a person, the illusion presented does not exist unless the observer sets it into motion by walking around it. Islam purposefully makes visible the artifice behind moving image technologies. The discourse that is framed as moving image art and placed in the gallery for our perusal is one that constructs a dialogic encounter with several layers of artistic forms, our complicit awareness and in particular the sensorium of the living body. The purpose of this present study is to demonstrate the importance of Bakhtin s dialogism to the analysis of moving image art forms. In addition, I am specifically arguing for a conception of active observership that is predicated on

5 4 Introduction embodiment, which is key to Bakhtin s understanding of aesthetics. The interrelated Bakhtinian categories that fall under the rubric of dialogism outsideness, the dialogic, the chronotope, answerability and polyphony provide a means of examining the fundamentally intertextual and dialogic nature of art making and viewing, a perspective that is not fully developed within the existing literature on moving image art. The work of Bakhtin is notable for its assertion that any reading of a text is characterized by an infinite and unfixed openness of interpretation. He demonstrates his point by approaching the text from a number of different angles and in doing so highlights the necessity of multiple points of view to sustaining a vibrant and open discourse, one that continually examines its own givens and assumptions. His approach anticipates structuralism and poststructuralism, however, unlike Barthes and Derrida, he does so in a markedly materialist fashion through his constant emphasis of embodiment. More importantly, his approach is one predicated on the lived experience of both author(s) and reader(s) in their unique locations in time and space. In Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences Bakhtin states: There is neither a first word nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context, the word continues to speak endlessly reaching into both the future and the past. 6 Although his later writing focuses primarily on the novel, his earliest extant texts are concerned with art, aesthetics and the act of creation. 7 Bakhtin, Art and the Plastic Body Bakhtin s ideas, which have a remarkable affinity with the relative and fragmented subjectivities of the postmodern world, have been applied in a broad fashion across numerous disciplines such as education, anthropology, sociology, comparative literature, film, science and even music. Several key texts use Bakhtin as a means of examining the cultural agency inherent in visual images that circulate in film, television and popular culture. In Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film, Robert Stam applies Bakhtinian categories to analyze film and mass-media culture. Stam does much to advance the use of Bakhtin in relation to film and cultural studies in arguing that Bakhtin s theories display an intrinsic identification with difference and alterity, a built-in affinity for the oppressed and the marginal, a feature making them especially appropriate for the analysis of opposition and marginal practices, be they Third World, feminist, or avant-garde. 8 In her 2008 study Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond, Esther Peeren uses Bakhtin to examine popular culture as manifested in television, the carnival and the novel in relation to questions of identity and agency. In spite of the fruitful and diverse

6 Bakhtin and Moving Image Art 5 applications of Bakhtin to visual culture, the employment of Bakhtin s theories to the field of visual art has been minimal. Deborah Haynes s Bakhtin and the Visual Arts (1995) is the first major study to examine Bakhtin s ideas in relation to art. Although Haynes does apply Bakhtin to electronic technologies and performance art in her 1997 article On the Need for Ethical Aesthetics, where she argues for a visual art that is predicated on an ethical aesthetics that is an aesthetics in which artists and observers are morally responsible for their engagement with art there are no extensive applications of Bakhtin to moving image art. 9 In Bakhtin and the Visual Arts Haynes intentionally neglects to discuss Bakhtin s later writings on dialogism and the carnival. Instead her discussion of Bakhtin is limited to his early essays on aesthetics, an omission that she has been much criticized for. 10 Her focus on Bakhtin s early writings ignores his more mature texts, which the majority of Western scholarship has focused on since his introduction to the English-speaking world beginning in the 1970s. Furthermore, the limited scope of her study undermines her discussion of Bakhtin s phenomenology of self and other, which is one of the strongest elements in her book, because she excludes his later developments on intersubjectivity and power. The focus of Haynes arguments in relation to Bakhtin is that he brings us back to the aesthetics of the creative process itself, back to the activity of the artist or author who creates, ultimately arguing for an ethical art that depends on the moral dimensions of self and other relations. 11 Haynes erroneously reads Bakhtin as a particularly religious or moral thinker, which is odd since there are no reliable accounts of him being a devoted Christian and much of his writing is focused on an ethics of answerability which, as he structures it, does not depend on God, because all too often God functions as a loophole that prevents any meaningful answerability. 12 In addition, Bakhtin is well known for secularizing Hermann Cohen s Neo- Kantianism, in which Cohen draws upon Judaism and German Idealism to formulate a universal ethics. Yet, one of Haynes objectives is to use Bakhtin to criticize object and viewer-centred theories and to develop a renewed appreciation of the religious and moral significance of the artist s creative activity. 13 By focusing so much on the early Bakhtin Haynes misses the opportunity to develop Bakhtin s author/hero concept into a more fruitful analysis of the dialogic relationship between artist, artwork and observer, which is one of my goals. However, Haynes does realize that art criticism would benefit from the notion of conscious agency, which is an important element of my discussion of aesthetics. But she does not apply Bakhtin s conception of the responsive act in a sustained way and as a result neglects the possibilities that the response to an artwork offers in the context of social relations, i.e., ideological relations, in art criticism.

7 6 Introduction In disregarding Bakhtin s later texts Haynes neglects to examine the presence and vitality of dialogism and its related concepts within visual art, which, as my study demonstrates, constitutes the basis of an active relationship between artist and culture, as well as artist and observer. I am arguing that artists and viewers make conscious decisions in response to art and in doing so act; this is especially important in relation to questions of ideology and its (re)production. A key feature of moving image art is a dialogic engagement with texts, with artists often questioning the fixity of ideas and actively subverting issues of cultural identity, race, class, sexual differentiation and orientations. More importantly, Bakhtin offers a means of considering how artists reference, subvert or borrow other cultural material in their artwork. In this manner, Bakhtin s conception of dialogism has been applied to museum and gallery spaces by Charles R. Garoian, who argues that observers enter into a dialogue with museum artifacts and in doing so effectively challenge the received knowledge conception of the museum. 14 While Garoian persuasively argues for the dialogic in relation to the viewer and artifacts located within the gallery, he does not discuss the relationship of the artist to the artwork or the position of the artist in this dialogue. Both Haynes and Garoian use Bakhtinian theory as a means of highlighting the relational aspects of art. However, neither fully explores the implications of dialogism as a rubric of visual art. In Geography, Diaspora and the Art of Dialogism Jamelie Hassan, Mireya Folch-Serra applies Bakhtin s dialogic to Jamelie Hassan s art in terms of the geography of space and time, highlighting the manner in which two artists from different locations and times interact. 15 At the 13 th International Conference on Mikhail Bakhtin Anthony Wall presented a paper, Eavesdropping on Painting, in which he discussed the paintings of Nicolaes Maes, the 17 th century Dutch painter, and the dialogic relationship of the observer to Maes scenes of people eavesdropping. Wall s use of dialogism to analyze the active role of the observer in relation to Maes paintings highlights the possibilities for applying Bakhtin to a discussion of visual art, but more needs to be done in applying Bakhtin to visual art. In applying dialogism to moving image art I am attempting to demonstrate the manner in which visual language like verbal language, according to Bakhtin, is transformed from the absolute dogma it had been within the narrow framework of a sealed-off and impermeable monoglossia into a working hypothesis for comprehending and expressing reality. 16 A key component of dialogism is the relationship between the perception of reality and the understanding of an artwork by an embodied observer. This is not unlike the way in which a verbal text is deciphered and understood. Visual language communicates through (sometimes) material signs, which like a verbal or written text is read using the senses of the body. As Clark and Holquist point out, Bakhtin argues that to be

8 Bakhtin and Moving Image Art 7 conscious means to see something highlighting the visuality that is inherent in his conception of the dialogic. 17 Likewise, John Docker and Subhash Jaireth also call attention to Bakhtin s tendency to describe verbal discourse in terms of vision and being seen, consequently it is not surprising that his corporeal model has been adapted to visual culture. As they argue: Bakhtin s concepts of outsidedness, chronotope, heteroglossia (modified as heteroscopia) and dialogism have found potency in the study of visuality and visual culture. One of the reasons perhaps is that the artifacts of visual culture (such as paintings, photographs, cinema) are never encountered in a void. They are either immersed in the verbal or circumscribe the verbal. The verbal and the visual have become part of an extended event of co-being. 18 The verbal and the visual are inextricably bound together and as such it makes sense to consider the implications of Bakhtin s usage of visual, aural and corporeal terms to describe dialogism. Dialogic processes are characterized by what Bakhtin terms plastic-pictorial moments, which are emotional-volitional equivalents of possible visual representations that correspond in the aesthetic object to the meaning-independent plastic and pictorial whole. 19 Hence, the observer of art dialogically engages with the utterance or artwork by literally giving living form to what the artist communicates by translating what is visible into verbal meaning and in doing so brings art into contact with the corporeal and all its sensorial and emotional capacities. A dialogic response to art depends upon the bodies of observers, those whose bodies literally bring artwork into contact with life, through their contexts, perceptions, emotions, thoughts and responsive actions to what they see. The communication between artist and observer is made possible through the artwork, which functions as a bridge between the two: it is through the material form of an artwork that both can be said to dialogue. This meeting through the artwork can be thought of along the lines of Nietzsche s metaphorical moment of the shadow at noon: where there is no past, there is no present, there is only now and in that moment one becomes two. 20 The shadow at midday is that moment in dialogic exchange in which the observer embodies the artwork and in doing so returns the gaze of the artist. Any artwork, or text, is real to the extent in which the observer brings it into contact with their life and in doing so makes it real. Nietzsche s moment of the shortest shadow is a plastic-pictorial moment where the illusory world and the experiential world meet. 21 The same can be said of the meeting between the artifice of the artwork and the living reality of the observer. Art, like thoughts, are the shadows of our feelings always darker, emptier, simpler and this is why Bakhtin argues so passionately for the necessi-

9 8 Introduction ty of the creative moment in which art comes into contact with the fullness of life. 22 Accordingly, the plastic-pictorial moment is the communication of visible representations that becomes embodied in the unique time and space of the observer. My use of the term plastic bodies therefore references Bakhtin s notion of the plastic-pictorial moment in which the observer responds with her/his unique body and perspective that is, the observer whose response is needed to complete the artwork. In other words, art is a plastic form, which depends on the observer s body to exist. In a sense artistic observership is analogous to the question of a tree falling in a forest, if we reword it as If no one is in the context of the artwork, does the artwork make an utterance? According to Bakhtin the answer is no; while the physical artwork may exist without the material presence of an observer, it is simply inert material without someone to interpret it. As Bakhtin states: Art and life are not one, but they must become united in the body of the observer; hence, it is the living self that perceives the artwork and brings it to life. 23 In addition, the material body also encompasses the plastic-pictorial materiality of the moving image itself, which is notorious for blurring the boundaries of genre and media. The representations that constitute moving image art are themselves, similar to the position of the viewer, plastic in the sense that they are unfixed and open, fluid projections that vanish in the air only to be replayed for the next observer who continues the utterance. The term plastic bodies directly references the necessity of the observer s body within the creative act: for Bakhtin the viewer is the one who completes the artwork, gives the artwork a necessary body to be lived, or experienced, through. For this reason, a major portion of my text focuses on a thorough investigation of the role of the observer as a key component in the dialogic processes of the artwork. The observer s engagement with the time and space of the moving image is a subjective embodiment of the work as a living plastic body (a meeting between artist and observer in which one becomes two), which functions as a polyphonic screen upon which images are constituted and come into contact with the outside world. The dialogic process inherent in moving image art forms must be activated by the embodied response and presence of the observer. Bakhtinian concepts provide a significant means of analyzing how moving image art installations are constituted, specifically through the positing of an answerable observer whose response constitutes an act in any situation, a subject position that other methodological approaches do not sufficiently confront. For example, Roland Barthes argues for a reader that is without history and hence is without subjectivity, a reader whose birth requires the death of the author. As he states in The Death of the Author : The reader is the space on

10 Bakhtin and Moving Image Art 9 which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. 24 It seems odd that Barthes is a theorist who has been so readily incorporated into the canon of the so-called liberal visual arts since he attempts to fix or structure language as a textual, rather than a visual object. The reader is constructed as someone who is completely objective, a tabula rasa so to speak. More importantly, Barthes does not argue for the subjectivity of the reader, instead he privileges a reification of discourse at the expense of both author and subject. In contrast to Barthes, Bakhtin argues for dialogue, one that requires co-authorship on the part of the reader and the author, a relationship that does not demand the death of anyone s subjectivity as Barthes advocates. As Michael Holquist points out, Bakhtin s extraordinary sensitivity to the immense plurality of experience more than anything else distinguishes Bakhtin from other moderns who have been obsessed with language. I emphasize experience here because Bakhtin s basic scenario for modeling variety is two actual people talking to each other in a specific dialogue at a particular time and in a particular place. 25 Bakhtinian theory retains the plurality and polyphony of observerial and authorial voices, which allows for a discussion of the particular subjectivity of the observer as a necessary part of the creative process. For Bakhtin, the subjectivity of the observer is tied to the context or location of the observer and even this subjective context is in constant dialogue with a plurality of others. Deborah J. Haynes highlights the problem behind the tendency of dominant discourses to privilege the object at the expense of different subjectivities when she states: Feminists have pointed to the curious and even dangerous fact that white male theorists such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault have concentrated on the object and on the death of the subject or the death of the author precisely as women of all races and men of color have entered into the public sphere in increasing numbers. 26 Dialogism permits a discussion of the relationship between the subject and author, one that does not privilege the reification of discourse over lived experience. Perhaps more importantly, a dialogical method seeks out the subversive voices that challenge the monologism of authority.