TIFF 2011: Wavelengths 4: Space is the Place

Everyone in the avant-garde and experimental cinema world seems to revel in the idea of ‘space’: interior & exterior spaces, how one ‘negotiates’ space, ‘place’ vs. ‘space’, ‘virtual’ vs. ‘physical’, mapping vs. traveling, and so on down the line. Really, though, as we’re officially immersed in the still foreign space known as the WWW, we’re more disoriented now than ever before. I know, it’s a predictable statement coming from the filmmaker behind this programme’s sole internet-sourced work, but it really is everywhere: Now that we achieve greater mileage within the private space of our own homes than we ever have, how do artists grapple with the evolving standards for representing the three-dimensional world?

The six filmmakers showing new work in Wavelengths 4: Space is the Place, naturally, approach this question in very different ways. Chris Kennedy, whose 349 (For Sol LeWitt) began the programme, collapsed one of LeWitt’s gallery-sized installations into the single plane of the video frame, rushing through each ‘wall’ as if one’s nerve-endings were recalling the entire work in a highly compressed minute before shooting off into oblivion. Also working with the malleability of the way we define a ‘wall’ was Neïl Beloufa. His Untitled (see pic above) constructs a narrative of testimonies within a shakily artificial resort; its Brechtian set-up only further isolates the colonialist’s dream from a wallpapered fiction.

Surely one of the most affecting of the bunch was Mark Lewis’ Black Mirror at the National Gallery, and the affect here is one of pure and incomprehensible terror (might it have wandered over from the Midnight Madness premises?). Sure, there isn’t anything conventionally goosebump-inducing to be found in the handful of old Dutch landscape paintings hanging on the gallery walls. But how are we seeing these works? Why, that’d be through a circular mirror that is being pivoted and navigated around the room by a monolithic, black-as-night robot. The machine is arguably intended to be invisible, but then Black Mirror would just be a novel way of juxtaposing non-adjacent artworks for comparison’s sake, and what fun would that be? This is the most cryptic non-presence in cinema since Syndromes and a Century‘s ominous vacuum, for sure.

The programme’s namesake, by Wavelengths regular Eriko Sonoda, was another of her whimsical paper dances. One of the few artists whose work could be justifiably labelled ‘meticulous,’ Sonoda photographs a variety of angles of a corner in her studio, and then pins the printed images onto the walls of said corner. Then, frame by frame, Sonoda repositions the photographs in order to create a kaleidoscopic reconfiguration of the representational space. The effect is awesome, but a bit too simple and random to hold itself together. Ute Aurand’s Young Pines, the longest work by far in this programme, is also Japanese in spirit. What we see is a rhythmic travelogue that would evoke Nathaniel Dorsky were the images nearly as arresting; the overall impression is one of alienated distance, which could very well be the point.

Unable to credibly critique or praise my Coorow-Latham Road, there is only really the curation to address. Andréa Picard’s positioning of the twenty-minute work as Space is the Place‘s caboose is a potentially straight-forward move: its use of the Google Street View application (not to be confused with Google Earth) marks it as the only work of the evening that had to have been made in the last five years, and thus, draws us into the zeitgeist currently ‘threatening’ the film community. Not only are alternatives to celluloid proving relatively frugal in their shooting, production, and distribution capabilities, but, as is laid out in this work, representational moving-images can come from a work flow that’s devoid of any haptic experience. When the artist’s depiction of a space never touches beyond a two-dimensional exposure, space, essentially, becomes no place.