Reference of Frames

I got lucky, once, when teaching a Literature class about point-of-view. My friend Mark Friedlander had made an art installation which showed what I was struggling to tell.

I took my class to the gallery and invited them to engage with Mark’s work. It was plywood, like a packing case, about two meters high and a meter square. On two sides were tiny holes. If you walked up and put your eye to a hole, you saw into a miniature white corridor illuminated from above. It was like looking into the start of a labyrinth; your imagination was invited into the possibilities of a space where your physical body couldn’t go.

Mark Friedlander

You can see some later iterations of Mark’s work here.

It strikes me now that Mark’s box was a lot like the way I think about poetry: it was a space for the viewer/reader to make meaning. Many meanings were possible but all were bounded by Mark’s manipulation of the space - his crafting of the materials and his manipulation of the light source.

Tonight I have been thinking again about Mark’s art as I try to find a way to describe a dance performance I have just seen. The performance was called Impulse and it was extraordinary.

Unique in my experience, this was a “site specific” work, which meant that the performance wasn’t on a stage. Instead, the ticket gave directions to the stage door of Singapore’s Esplanade Theatre with clear instructions that if you were late, you wouldn’t be admitted.

At 7:00 pm sharp, I found myself backstage in the greenroom with 30 other audience members. After an initial safety briefing - “we’ll be moving around a lot, be careful - when you sit or stand for each scene, stay inside the taped areas otherwise you might get hurt by the dancers” - we were led through to the first performance space, a loading bay where we were asked to sit on the ground in the small space designed to be occupied by an off-loading truck.

Da:ns Festival

Load industrial music. Drum beats and sounds like assembly-line machinery. Dancers in blacks and greys and khaki. High energy. Running and jumping off walls. An intimate space with concrete and echoes. But a beginning that was powerfully confronting as a female dancer had her head bounced in slow motion against a wall and then held by her male companion against a railing. And the two of them froze for an uncomfortably long time so that the audience started taking furtive looks around to see if something was meant to be happening somewhere else. When the tension was broken by the four other dancers re-entering the space, the energy kept building. The raw intimacy of the dancing was accentuated by droplets of dancer-sweat hitting my face.

Clearly quite a performance. From the loading bay we moved to an industrial lift for the second movement and then to a workshop and finally a basement corridor between warehoused props.

It was in the workshop space that I started thinking about "framing" and Mark’s artwork. Ordinarily the workshop we were in builds the props which frame the dancers but tonight it became a frame itself. The choreography made extensive use of the fixtures in the space with the dancers plunging over and under tables, sliding on saw-benches and climbing on prop-boxes. The music and choreography was again pulsing and industrial with machine noises and movements that made me think about things being made. Things being shaped and controlled.

I’m struggling to find the words to describe the power and the point, but I think that may be part of the point; dance like music is its own language and not usefully reduced to the banality of words.

As I sat to try to write about it, I found instead that a poem was forming about my ambivalent relationship with cameras. Like Mark’s box, the camera takes the endless possibilities of the world and sucks them through a lens into a box. The world is framed and so often this seems banal. An Eichmann-like repetition of an unreflective act.

What I value about art - poetry, sculpture, dance and photography - is its capacity to reframe our experience - its capacity to invite a different view shaped to unsettle us from what is familiar. Tonight’s dance performance will keep me searching for words for a long time to come.

You can read the poem I wrote here.

Two weeks in New York - finding "rosebud".

Statue of Liberty being photographed
from the Staten Island Ferry

The flight from New York home to Singapore takes a bit less than 24 hours including a couple of hours to change planes in Tokyo - hours and hours sitting 10 kilometres above the earth’s surface with a few centimetres of aeronautical engineering between the bodies within and the minus 60 degree, very thin air outside.

Somewhere above the arctic circle, I started watching Orson Welles’ 1940s Hollywood classic, Citizen Kane. It seemed the right film to be watching in that strange space between cultures and time zones. As I sat endlessly in a darkened airplane and reflected on my two weeks in New York, Welles spoke of something essential about the American psyche.

A frame for understanding.

Looking at the Empire State from on top of the Rockefeller
Building

Citizen Kane is set in early 20^th century America and tells the story of a billionaire newspaper magnate who builds a mansion which he fills with the greatest art he can find from across the world. Kane could be read as representing any one of the industrial barons who built New York. This is a city of the most astounding monolithic buildings filled with the most remarkable collections of (mostly European) art. It is a city of excess and extreme that astounds, but it is also a city of contradictions and complexities. Welles makes use of a clever device to explore the motivations of Kane: he sets the film after Kane’s death and the plot follows the explorations of a newspaper journalist who is trying to discover the meaning of Kane’s final dying word: “rosebud”. The meaning of this word remains largely enigmatic in the film. What is clever and powerful about Welles’ plot, however, is that in piecing together the various stories about Kane, the viewer is left not with one simple answer, but with a complex and contradictory image of Kane which is paradoxically credible.

And that is what I feel about New York. It would be relatively easy to write about the desire of the nouveau riche to build monolithic phallic objects as symbols of power and insecurity or of the oedipal struggle of a young and powerful nation to establish its credibility in the eyes of Mother France and Father England, but this would be to neglect the beauty and humanity that is also a part of this paradoxical place. What struck me about NewYork is that it is both Wall Street and the United Nations Headquarters; both consumer excess and Central Park; both Broadway cliche and cutting edge drama at the Lincoln Center; both the smell of mould in my room at the YMCA and the beauty of the Y's 19th Century facade. New York, like “Rosebud”, seems to me to be an enigma: richly rewarding those who choose to explore but built in layers of contrasting colours and defying any simple explanation.

Manhattan framed through the dirt and fingermarks of travelers on
the Staten Island Ferry 

Windows and Mirrors

What always fascinates me as I photograph something that has been photographed thousands and probably millions of times before, is how my vision might be different from those many others. I am increasingly interested in taking photos of others taking photos. The reflections and refractions of meaning as images pass through the filters of different minds intrigue me. I wrote about this on the day that I went to visit the DIA gallery at Beacon, an hour and a half north of New York by train. Before visiting the gallery, I walked to the top of Mt Beacon and found myself reflecting on the issue of meaning and perspective that seems so particularly salient when one is travelling.

 Making meaning 

The tree in front of me

Is on a mountain

In New York State

View of the Hudson river from Mt Beacon

But the pen I’m

Writing with was

Made in Germany

And the fingers

Guiding it were

Made in Australia

And the language

Describing it was

Made in England

Where were you made?

And in what realm

Shall we locate this

Tree we have made

Together?

DIA Beacon was a revelation. Here the frame was an old 19^th century factory which seemed as integral to the process of making meaning as the objects it housed. The generosity of space offered to the art works was an important part of how I viewed them. I was reminded of the difference between seeing an animal in a zoo and watching one running in the wild. 


The works of Gerhard Richter had a particular resonance as they explored the possibility of art - and photography particularly - to be understood through either the metaphor of a mirror or a window. These massive translucent panels reflected the spaces around them each at a slightly different angle.

Richard Serra's work also stood out. It reminded me of the work of my Melbourne friend Mark Friedlander with its focus on angles and architecture.

Finding Rosebud

The last word on frames and meaning can go to this character. I met him down on West 34th street on my way to watch the 4th of July fireworks. In the middle of telling me where I might get a good vantage point, he suddenly jumped to attention and pointed to five national guard helicopters flying in formation behind me:

"Would you look at that! I'm gonna shoot the bastards"

And he picked up his old video camera and began.






You can find a link to my photos of New York here.