“If made-up lives are better than true biographies, then it’s the absolute truth that Keaton was a tipsy geameter, an amnesiac hypnotist, a palsied ballet master, a commander in chief with dyspepsia, a Columbus sailing for Prague.”

–Robert Benayoun

“Beautiful as a bathroom, vital as a Hispano… With Buster Keaton the expression is modest as that of a bottle for example; although around the round, clear circuit of his pupils dances his aseptic soul. But the bottle and the face of Buster have their viewpoints in infinity.”

–Luis Bunuel

As long as I can remember I have been entranced by Dada Buster, the stoic comedian whose haunting face ranks along with Lincoln’s, as Hugh Kenner once remarked, “as an early American archetype”.(1) As an artist and writer/theorist and as a cinephile going back to the mid-sixties, I (like many of my cinema-going generation) took to Keaton’s handsome Mount Rushmore face, his ubiquitous flat-brimmed hat, and his incandescent pyrotechnics of acrobatics in a world of machines and buildings collapsing around him. Keaton’s look, to echo Benayoun once more, was perpetually fixed in an absurd (almost) metaphysical gaze, a dignified, stoical gaze that illuminated the world as a Kafkaesque comedy. Keaton’s perennial “art of sinking” (Kenner) was predicated on a life that encapsulates for me many complex issues concerning the ongoing story of art and technology in this century. What follows is a brief reflective commentary on Keaton’s importance for my own practice as a media artist-writer performer, one which is concerned with the shifting audiovisual, cultural, and technological complexities of media theory and practice as we are about to exit the twentieth century. Keaton’s art is relevant for these times, an era when media art is in need of rigorous, well-informed theorisation, as much as back in the twenties when Keaton was creating his kinetic cinema of love, displacement and sorrow.

Like Jacques Tati’s modernist oeuvre, Keaton’s wondrous cinema is instructive for many elaborate reasons: not least because it points to the absurd humour, irony (something that, as William Gibson never tires to remind us, is missing in academic and popular discussions of the new media) and real-time performance as satire of the technologized concerns and textures of our world. Kenner’s definition of Keaton’s thematic subject is as “kinetic man, a being he approached with the almost metaphysical awe we reserve for a doppelganger”.(2) It was a subject that reverberated, amongst other things, a highly personal level of existential stoicism. Witness the eerie and moving account given by Stan Brakhage in his inimitable prose style (in parts reminiscent of Celine and Frampton) in Film Biographies, a book radiant with a Blakean textual energy, of accidentally seeing a silent Keaton (in 1957) sitting in front of him in Los Angeles’ The Coronet Theatre watching Steamboat Bill, Jr.—a lonely man, overlooked by the world—as Brakhage and his friend convulsed with laughter.

Keaton is a touchstone for me for he personifies the reflective necessity (given his consummate self-critical and performative stance towards a world of aeroplanes, telephones, radios, cinemas, steam-trains and skyscrapers) to question one’s own cultural and epistemological baggage. In my own film and video work (especially in my recent three-channel installation Night Sky and the forthcoming autobiographical/landscape/performance videotape Autumn Song) I explore questions of old and new media, of contextualising the historical avant-garde in terms of recent art and cultural theory. of colliding the cinema with electronic art, performance with collage theory, (post) modernist literature with installation art, and the impossibility of autobiography in a time of amnesia/post-coloniality.

Keaton’s paradoxical art of stasis and mobility, of being inside and outside of technology, offers new horizons of possibilities for my continuing exploration of the relatively uncharted hinterland between analogue and digital media. (As the late Gilles Deleuze noted, “the arts, science and philosophy are already bringing about unforseen creative encounters”).(3) Moreover, in the sequence, for example, in Night Sky where we see Buster on top of a turning train wheel approaching my speaking mouth (I am reading a passage from Michel Serres’ Oasis Semiotext(e) text travelling in the Davis Sound (the Northwest Passage) located between the Arctic and Pacific Oceans—more of this in a performance to illustrate my own interdisciplinary relationship to Keaton’s comic work and experimental video.(4) In light of this, I have improvised certain studio performances for Autumn Song which draws upon a number of different Keaton set-ups in his silent films and collaboration with Samuel Beckett in Film.

Today, anyone who is working with electronic media as a theorist and/or as an artist needs to negotiate the role of amnesia that is characterising our attempts to think, write and make digital art. Keaton’s life is an exemplary instance of our propensity to conveniently overlook “the old” for the sake of “the new”. Oust before he died in 1966, Keaton was given a special award at the Venice Film Festival where he is reported to have said. “Where were you twenty years ago when I needed you?”) Contemporary artists and theorists as diverse as Mario Periola. Andreas Huyssen, Woody and Steina Vasulka, Nicholas Zurbrugg, Jim Collins, and Avital Ronell, have highlighted the importance of addressing this problem in any rudimentary instance of art and technology criticism/writing and practice. This is not unique to new media studies (viz. the American literary critic Philip Rhav once termed America “Amnesia”): but given the un informed, breathless form of writing that still marks our current approaches to the new cultural forms, we need to remind ourselves that the critique of amnesia as a mass-mediated malady of capitalist culture is not new in itself—as Huyssen points out—for instance, witness Adorno’s, Benjamin’s and Heidegger’s inter-war writings on culture’s obsession with memory and the fetish nature of mass cultural forms.(5) Further, my own artistic and theoretical practice strives to underscore how today’s cybernetic virus of amnesia is threatening to consume memory.

If we were to value the intertextual potential that resides between old and new media on the same plane of multimedia creativity, we would also benefit from observing Serres’ characterization of the legacy of Cartesian rationalism as a totalising violent force in our approach to the question of two cultures and the fate of analogue media in a post-computer epoch. Thus, for Serres, there are complex passages that we can traverse from one domain to another, like the difficult (but rewarding) routes—as cited above—between isolated islands of order in a sea of chaos as in the Northwest Passage, from one medium to another, providing we problematise global paradigms and universal ahistorical modes of thinking and are prepared to shift our ways of knowing by negotiating complexity, disorder, uncertainty, and multiplicity in our lives.

Buster, our deadpan comedian, for me, is a necessary part of this creative adventure. His respect for fluidity in space and real-time has much to offer to anyone who is contemplating contributing to electronic art. We need to value Serres’s insight that all authors (irrespective of the medium) are our contemporaries.

John Conomos, 2013 (1999)

Notes:

1. Hugh Kenner. The Counterfeiters. New York. Anchor Books. 1973: 31
2. Ibid: 57.
3. Gilles Deleuze. “On The Crystalline Regime.” Art and Text, No.34. 1989: 30
4. Michel Serres. “The Northwest Passage”. Semiotext(e). vol. 4. No.3. 1984: 67. (See for example. “Night Sky”. Cantrills Filmnotes. Nos. 73174. May 1994: 9′11).
5. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories, New York, Routledge. 1995:4.

Sources:

• Robert Benayoun. The Look of Buster. London. Pavillion Books. 1984 (ed.& trans. by Randall Conrad).
• Stan Brakhage. Film Biographies. Berkeley. Turtle Island. 1979. 2nd Ed.
• Natalia Ginzburg. “Film” in, A Place to Live: Other Selected essays of Natalia Ginzburg. New York. Seven Stories Press. 2001. (Selected essays chosen and Iran. Lynne Sharon Schwartz).
• Michel Serres with Bruno Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture and Time. Ann Arbor. The University of Michigan Press. 1995.

Selected Filmography:

• Steamboat Bill, Jn. (1928) Chas. F. Reisner
• Film (1964) dir. Alan Schneider

Selected Videography:

• Night Sky (1992–93), John Conomos
• Autumn Song (1997), John Conomos

I am emailing you from a faraway city. From another time, another space, in the lingering hope that my voice will be heard.

That it will be greeted by another face, another heart, that maybe is beating in simpatico with the diurnal rhythms, light, spaces and sounds of our turning shared planet.

A planet that is increasingly morphing into a panopticon of shattered dreams, unbridled consumerism, global poverty and as yet uncharted weather patterns in human history.

It is in the context of the whirlwind of the last century’s aesthetic, cultural, political and technological revolutions, a century of manifestos and paradigm – shifting creativity of art, culture and knowledge, that our exhibition too may be seen as being a timely speculative manifesto of sorts.

For in its experimental and poetic ways, Etudes for the 21st century, proposes new possibilities of re-examining our existence, what Jean Cocteau once described as “the difficulty of being’’, and our very way of life in our new unfolding century.

The three of us, as artists and citizens, are collaborating for the first time in a kind of global conversation that is, simply put, a multifaceted cartography of image, sound, text, and space.

The question is how do we create art that is life – affirming, poetic, and sustainable, aesthetically, ontologically and ethically, for all of us.

Art that asks us: what does it mean to be contemporary, as Giorgio Agamben poses, and how do we engage in the difficult negotiation between the past and the future without being blinded by the lights of one’s time?

This exhibition in all of its trans-disciplinary concerns and contours will be forged as a manifesto that paradoxically suggests: is it possible to conceive the future without a manifesto?

You maybe wondering why “etude” and how does that concept relate to the overall conceptual and formal architecture of our exhibition? The word in French refers to ‘study’ but it is also often deployed to describe a short musical composition, characteristically for one instrument and created as an exercise or a practice to improve one’s technique. What the ancient Greeks called ‘techne’. Yet, at the same time, it is also performed for its artistic value.

This simply meant that the practice of art, regardless to which medium or form, can be said to be a lifelong endeavour to advance oneself with aesthetical, conceptual, intellectual, ethical, and spiritual means. In fact, very often all of the above.

The underlying inspiration of our exhibition has been primarily, amongst other factors, classical Chinese writing as early as represented by the seminal text Wen-Fu, by Lu Chi (261-303), defining strategies for practitioners on how to actualise many of the above concerns. The author moreover reminds us that, such endeavours should not only exist in the art practice itself, but should be also embraced in our daily life.

Thus, it is in this critical context, that the Chinese art critic and translator Fu Lei (1908-1966), constantly reminded his son, the acclaimed pianist Fou Ts’ong that, before you become a pianist, you should learn to become an artist; but before you become an artist, you should first set learning to be a human being as the top priority. The latter, above everything else.

The second part of the exhibition, Etudes for the Everyday, attempts to heighten our individual and communal mindfulness in everyday life.

As our exhibition is an adventure of what Rosalind Krauss, once termed ‘post-modern’ creativity, it is desired that all of us living in a given community may partake in this shared aesthetic and ethical undertaking as composers of the very rhythms of this city at large.

By listening to each other, face to face, undistracted by all that can distract one living in such a city, here and elsewhere, daily life can become a more existentially fulfilling one.

As the new century unfolds, in order to pass through the narrow straits of the present in our desire to resist the homogeneity of time and space so we may glimpse the liminal horizons of the future, this exhibition ideally values equally imaginative boldness, courage and tenacity as much as doubt, hesitation and reflection.

Though the future is unknowable, each step we take towards it the echoes of the past are always with us.

What matters, above all, is what kind of world do we want to live in? The present one?

Where polar bears are doomed stranded on floating floes of ice in vast empty seas that are rising and our own bodies possibly negated by a permanent two or three degree change in our body temperature.

A waterless war ravaged world where drones are replacing birds. And technology is amputating ourselves from ourselves.

All too familiarly predicted by J. G. Ballard, Marshall McLuhan and others. Including John Berger, who once described our world as a prison planet.

A world like a snake (helplessly) devouring itself.

And that once resembled a child’s spinning top that continuously sparked joy and pleasure and now is seemingly grinding to a sudden faltering halt.

We are, to put it charitably, on the cusp of human survival. The question remains, as always: who will inherit the earth? Will our children and their children roam a liveable planet learning how to live lives that enhance life itself rather than to destroy it?

These are not just rhetorical questions, dear spectator, but one of compelling empirical urgency.

Will we humans ever learn, to quote Jacques Derrida in the fading time of his own life: “Finally learn how to live? “

And yet here I write to you in a city that once when spotted through a ship’s porthole, whose blinking neon calligraphic skyline, of soaring glass cathedrals of commerce and modernity, by a young ambitious film director Fritz Lang inspired the classical utopian/dystopian world of Metropolis.

A phantasmagorical city that never sleeps.

Whose archetypal template of artistic and mercantile modernism and futurism had irrevocably stamped the cauldron of human creativity and imagination.

And I speak to you, in this city that provided Lang with a terrifying cartography of heaven and hell, a city of pleasure gardens and strutting peacocks for the wealthy, the privileged, those born to rule, above ground, and below, the walking cadavers, the other kind of drones, who march to work in hypnotic beat to a gargantuan clock.

A city that also inspired, as Michael Taussig recently reminded us in his singular incantatory account of the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 that began in Zuccotti Park and swept around the world, Diego Rivera to create a painting “Frozen Assets” with a similar dark vision of Manhattan skyscrapers as temples and below – always below – a cavernous morgue of laid out corpses and a lonely guard like a shepherd dog minding its flock of sheep.

Nothing has changed in this city – a city built on slaves and American natives’ graves – take you pick: Lang’s celluloid geometry of fatalism, destiny and revolt or Rivera’s painting whose archeological features vividly suggest a world of relentless exploitation and death of the masses while the elite rule – in our lives today, it’s the bankers – in their soaring serene glass cathedrals of greed and domination.

How was it when the Andulasian poet and playwright, Federico Garcia Lorca, in his scorching testament of introspection and the cruelty of modern industrial life Poet in New York described Wall Street as being? Lorca’s following words are a prescient foreshadowing of the recent Occupy movement:

“The Stock Exchange shall become a pyramid of moss.
Jungle vines shall come n behind the rifles
and all so quickly, so very, very quickly.
Ay, Wall Street ! “

And let us not forget Bertold Brecht’s telling witticism about bankers: “What is a bank robber compared to the person who has established the bank itself? “

Sounds familiar, dear spectator? Perhaps the unifying wildfire chant of the Occupy movement’s 99% people against the 1% maybe still reverberating in your ears?

This utopic rupture in recent history – that took place in Wall Street – where signs, slogans, and make-shift tents of political disobedience meant the possibility of creating a new civil world of human aspiration and imagination. Of another world within this present one, as Paul Eluard wrote about, all those years ago.

The momentous self-reflexive, culture creating activities and events of 2011, in what is often described as “Global City”, signified new beginnings, nothing less than, perhaps, the rebirth of the political.

And what of the people who organically participated in these global semisgraphic shocks, of their faces and bodies standing zombie – like with their placards of dream and revolt, wanting a better common world for all? For Taussig, they powerfully signified “graven images outside time.”

As one gets older one values our common world of aesthetic, cultural, dialogic and existential possibilities.

Art, writing, are in the final essence, shadows on the wall of life. Friendship above all these two any tick of the clock. But they are vital shadows that critically illuminate our lives.

When Friedrich Nietzsche, one of our enduring light – keepers, once said: “Should life rule knowledge and science, or should knowledge rule over life? Which of these two forces is higher and more decisive? No one would doubt: life is higher, the ruling force, for any knowledge that destroyed the world simultaneously destroy itself.
Knowledge presupposes life, hence it has the same interest in the preservation of life that every creature has in its own continued
existence.”

How many of us have taken heed of Nietzsche’s words? How many of us as artists, academics, curators, writers and spectators are not clambering over each other in the name of careerism, self-interest and narcissism.

All of us, some more than others, are complicit – in the Sartrean sense – with the engulfing global free-market ideology that is seeping into our universities, museums, cultural institutions and industries. This is not new news, as we all know. It is just that reflexive knowledge, and self- and institutional critiques are rapidly receding into oblivion.

What we are encountering, day by day, is a vertiginous global world of panoptic Fordism. Which is exceedingly fracturing Antoine de Saint – Exupery’s apt description of the world we have familiarly known as one being of winds, stars and tides. No time for such a world as we are too busy, too busy, in our public and private lives.

A few years ago, Jean-Luc Godard went to New York by plane from Europe and on his way back he chose to return by boat. Asked why he took the boat Godard replied: “To see an open sky.” How many of us today see an open sky?

One makes images and words because it is the only way one knows how best to interact with this world. One is compelled to do so. It is a vocation.

It is that simple and that complex. As John Cage use to say, rather enigmatically, “nothing more, nothing less.”

One is also obliged to treat the past, the present and the future as one continuing dialogue of possibilities. Being alive to our one shared world. Treating the past as part of the present, in other words, believing in (to use Octavio Paz’s words) “an antiquity without dates.”

In the late 1970s Susan Sontag was once asked what is the role of an artist or a writer in modern society? Sontag, who certainly lived up to her following words, replied that it was to pierce the narcotic veil that society produces on a daily basis and to show the possibilities of another world.

Etudes for the 21 st Century advocates the view that art must be an invitation to contemplate the presence of beauty and the sublime in our lives as spectators, as artists, and as citizens. It is only in recent memory that beauty itself has been re-introduced into the discourse of contemporary art. Whether we speak of analogue or digital art both can be impoverished unless we are willing to acknowledge beauty as one of the definitive aesthetic, cognitive and ethical forces in today’s world.

To speak of beauty and the sublime as Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant and others spoke of it as a co-mingling of awe and terror is to be willing to explore the enduring impact that they have in the literary, dramatic and plastic arts.

When our eyes encounter beauty are we compelled, as Ludwig Wittgenstein once argued, to want to draw it?

Beauty matters in so many uncharted telling ways. Not least, as Elaine Scarry has recently demonstrated, because it is first of all sacred, it is unprecedented, and without sounding too melodramatic about it, it can be lifesaving. Whether it is Homer, Plato, Dante, Augustine or Proust, all of them averred that beauty quickens the beat of our hearts, makes life more vivid and worthwhile living. In essence, beauty greets you when you encounter it and indeed underscores the immense gift that life is.

It is also a calling to ponder the fragility of our material world and to seek, in a democratic civil society, that aesthetic fairness as well as ethical fairness are shared and central to human perception. Finally, it behoves us, in our universities, museums and schools that the beautiful artefacts of the people in the past are, as Scarry rightly notes, carried forward over to people in the future.

As artists and writers, one needs to be appreciative of the unwavering necessity to be aware of how many different kinds of cultural, linguistic and psychic borders, one crosses in their lifetime. It was Kafka who once described his nocturnal feverish writings as an act ‘of interior emigration.

The most direct route to the past and the present, knowledge and ethics, critique and poetry, is the one that roams freely across the ‘compartmentalisation’ of everyday life, that gets you from one point to another, that allows you to geographically and intellectually trespass, is the indirect one. Where everything is, to echo William Blake, connected to everything else.

A sense of place has also been always dear to one. Landscape as lifescape, soundscape, tastescape, and memoryscape. Landscape as dis-location. Landscape is, as one sees and hears and interacts with it,
something that lies, to evoke Jean-Francois Lyotard, ‘beyond the cultivated zone.’ Beyond the law of genre.

The dramatic global changes in capital, power, media and technology have wrought –- new aesthetic, cultural, epistemological and ethical shifts in how we define landscape, community, home and place.

We need also to remind ourselves that the critique of cultural amnesia as a mass-mediated malady of late-capitalist culture is not new in itself – for example, witness Theodore Adorno’s, Walter Benjamin’s and Martin Heidegger’s inter-war writings on culture’s obsession with memory and the fetish quality of mass cultural forms. This is an important issue that often blights our cultural and epistemological endeavours to discuss art, culture, history and technology shifting in our ever – changing techno-culture.

Critically, then, cultural amnesia is paradoxically conveyed by our computer – inflected media in our age of consumption, information-networks and global capital.

To speak of one’s own art and writing practice is always a difficult thing to do in the light of D. H. Lawrence’s wise cautionary observation “Never trust the artist, trust the tale”.

For one is critically concerned with questions of seeing and hearing which maybe hovering beyond our present horizons of creative, cultural and existential possibilities. Neither here nor there, so to speak, but yonder. But as we do, as Siri Hustvedt once reminded her readers, one ‘can never find themselves yonder.’

There is the rub: art and writing, for us, share a perennially nagging, half-glimpsed, striving towards an undecided elsewhere ( Maurice Blanchot/Hugh Kenner/Ezra Pound). One never arrives.

Art that questions itself and articulates an overall attempt to be self-reflexive, open-ended, always motivated to remind ourselves that art is power and it needs to be always ‘untimely’, to put in Friedrich Nietzsche’s term.

Creating as a polemic with our time-haunted world.

By existential necessity one is – what you would call in the classical European sense of the term – a ‘ragpicker.’ Or if you will, an ‘aesthetic vagabond’ (Jean-Louis Schefer) interested in the multiplying ‘creative encounters’( Deleuze ) that have been and are taking place between art, cinema, video and the new media technologies.

Concerned with the conversations that exist between these different art forms, contexts, and genres. Locating the ancients next to the moderns in the same room and seeing what may ensue?

Through cunning, language, mimicry and play one learns to value beauty, difference, exilic marginality, self-reflexivity and experimentation in order to survive, to make sense of one’s ongoing life.

You cling to experience, feelings, intuition, smells, and passion, as well as colour, form, genres, texture, space, fragments, essays, aphorisms, quotes and digressions like a marooned sailor does to floating wreckage.

One’s past, identity, and self is intimately predicated on place, gender, history, memory, and time. This means absurdity, irony, scepticism, solitude and vulnerability.

Rilke’s central belief that the artist or writer is the bearer of cultural memory will increase in importance as this century unfolds. Making memory matter.

Art-making (irrespective of the medium) as a fugitive, elliptical enterprise that questions one’s own aesthetic, cultural and epistemological values.

The artist and writer as self-interrogator, as trickster, crossing the thresholds of multiple forms. Always attempting to dig deep, mingling things, perennially engaged in boundary creation and boundary crossing.

Forever curious, sceptical and suspicious of things especially of the continuous prison-houses we create and incarcerate ourselves in the name of art, cinema, culture, knowledge, and society.

Having an unswerving willingness to leave the beaten path.
Art as a form of ‘travelling without a passport ‘(Steve Fagin), or as the French would say, being ‘paperless’ – homeless, ‘without (identity) papers.”

Engaged in critical speculative enterprises, located at the edge, always in the midst of things, suspicious of homogeneity, fetishisation and linearity.

To make visible the invisible, to say the unsayable, you need to be bold in your convictions, recalling Cocteau’s wise counsel “Art is worthless in my opinion unless it be the projection of some ethic. All else is decoration.”

This means that the artist and writer of this century, like in the last
one, will need to cultivate a fluid capacity to approach complex subjects with lightness, speed and simplicity.

Above all, “Etudes for the 21st Century” has been forged on today’s anvil of techno-creativity, resonating Cezanne’s telling wisdom: “Things are disappearing. If you want to see anything, you have to hurry.”

John Conomos, 7 October 2013, New York

Double Take: A Forum with Brad Buckley and John Conomos in conjunction with Buckley and Conomos’ exhibitions The Slaughterhouse Project: Alignment and Boundaries (L’Origine du monde) and I wonder whether that’s Joanna Hiffernan with a Brazilian (revisited), and The Spiral of Time. Chaired by Nicholas Tsoutas, the speakers Dr Ann Finegan, Dr Alex Gawronski and Professor Ross Harley engage in a conversation with the artists about their diverse modes of production and their influences in the context of installation art. 4 May 2013, Australian Centre for Photography.

TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Tsoutas

Today we are here to engage with the exhibition projects, the slaughter house projects, alignment and boundaries, and forgive me I don’t speak French but I’ll pronounce it as best I can, L’Origine du monde, and I wonder whether that’s Joanna Hiffernan with Brazilian Revisited and Insulation by Brad Buckley and The Spiral of Time by John Conomos.

Brad Buckley who is a Professor of Contemporary Art at Sydney College of the Arts is a committed installation artist whose work and interests operates at the intersection of theatre and performance in the context of instillation as he investigates, provokes, challenges and questions the critical issues of cultural control, democracy, freedom and social responsibility along with complex questions of sexuality, eroticism and desire as well as the politics of being an Australian in Australia today and what constitutes being an Australian. He has exhibited nationally and internationally including Canada, Japan, New York and Israel and across Australia at a number of contemporary art spaces. I think we first met Brad about 25 plus years ago when we exhibited your work at the Performance Space from memory, a long time ago.

He has collaboratively published with his fellow exhibitor and colleague John Conomos Re thinking the Contemporary Art school, the artist, the PhD and the academy published by the University of Halifax Press. He is also published again with John Conomos The Republic of Ideas published by Pluto Press and Art Space a publication which examined the social, political and cultural implications of an Australian republic in the context of the visual arts and new global economies.

They have been recently initiated and have been contributing to the cultural debate with writing and provocations on the delinquent curator, a subject that’s close to most curator’s hearts so we’re all waiting with abated anticipation of what’s going to emerge from that.

John Conomos is an Associate Professor at Sydney College of the Arts but is an artist with an interdisciplinary interest across photo media, video art and cinema. In the catalogue he has been described as an essayist who over a long period of time has contributed to the intellectual and critical debates that inform and have informed the development of video art practices, new media and contemporary art in our times provocatively and avant-gardeishly enriching our consciousness and our discourse on those media practices through the lens of cinema and film history. His practice as an auto biographer and often photo performance based as he innovatively interrogates questions of identity and memory and the contemporary philosophical questions of our time as he explores the fragility of life and the necessity of remembering things past in relation to how we produce meaning in the present.

Brad and John have produced two projects, two very different diverse projects, almost divergent projects and I guess the challenge of today’s discussion will be not only how we evaluate and contextualize the works individually and independently of each other but in the discussion to investigate intersections through each other no matter how fragile they are and how invisible they seem to appear.

Whilst they don’t necessarily collaborate as artists as Brad Buckley state in the catalogue, we collaborate as public intellectuals in the extended public sphere using publication, text and discourse to argue their views often forthrightly in strategies of engagement as a means of provoking artistic cultural and public debate on critical issues affecting and impacting not only on our social contributions but how contemporary art and contemporary art education function in that social and political construction particularly in relation to being an Australian and from the perspective of being an Australian and the complex questions of what is identity in Australia today and both I would suggest have been significant participants and contributors to the building of our culture as we know it today but possibly from very different perspectives and very different possibilities.

Brad Buckley sees his work as an instrument that interrogates how we are controlled, manipulated and how pressure is applied for us to conform, whether it be sexually, morally or politically as he sharpens focuses on what is acceptable behaviour in relationship between power and control. Deliberately provocative he utilises material and a subjectivity that foregrounds the erotic and what some people have argued as pornographic but central to his interest is this discourse and certainly in the exhibitions, in the exhibition that’s out there today he focuses on the whole question of desire, how it functions in art and society and how he suggests that affects all of us here today regardless of what some would argue as being fashionable and regardless of how we are constrained by it.

John Conomos on the other hand, his autobiographical photo media and video art approaches are from an intertexualist perspective, phenomenological and existentially informed. It’s almost classical in the way that he’s developed his practice in his intellectual refraction of his life and of the world. The history of the 20th Century writers and philosophers affect and impact on his agency as an artist and constantly populate his language and even more amazingly in almost a photographic memory his recollection is quite extraordinary as he supports his arguments with quotes directly from eminent figures of the 20th Century including people like Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche, Kafka, Freud, Sartre, Barthes, Orson Wells and almost every philosopher, film maker and video artist that you can think of and he does this intuitively. He reflexes in ways that incorporate those histories, those languages, those critical positions in a way that not only adds dimension to what he has to say but extends and extrapolates on those theorists and philosophers.

As an essayist his knowledge is encyclopaedic and has influenced many young contemporary artists today and it never ceases to amaze me when I talk to a lot of artists in our community how they always come back to a talk by John or they say he said something to them that changed the way they think or he provoked them in a way that really questioned their practice.

His languages are often poetic and paradoxical and are transgressive, and quoting directly from John “I am an artist. I was a video artist in the early days when video art was transgressive. I lost a few cinema friends as I crossed the floor politically as they asked me ‘what is this thing, video? Is it a form of foreign hieroglyph’. But I was mesmerized by it. I had to decipher it. These liminal images on the horizon of the human imagination. Language is always behind the latest rupture of techno creativity”. I hope Ross might be able to comment on that provocation at some point during his talk.

Even video people think video art is a parse thing now although John very categorically states that, and I can vouch for this, that he thinks video art is alive. He doesn’t believe in used by dates. He believes in what Michael Sares suggests when he said “put Socrates, Heidegger, Blake and Celine in the same room, all on the same plane and give me a vantage point to become a deep sea diver into the subconscious society and critique its institutional logic. But you do that at a price and that price is always on the outside looking in”.

Whether outside or being in between, John’s work is instrumental in reading contemporary video art, the logic of its image making and the way that it consciously perpetrates the way we see things not only in terms of video as art within the gallery context but in its cinematic implications, in its televisualness, in the way that it informs our entire image making process as it is re thinking the post colonial philosophy of contemporary and multicultural Australia.
As collaborators they have produced two distinct bodies of work here today and its now, having set a little bit of the frame of some of the discussion that I hope will take place today, I’d like to introduce the speakers to you who will speak in the following order, Dr Alex Gawronski, Professor Ross Harley and Anne Finnegan who will talk about the work here today from different contexts and different perspectives.

Our next speaker is Professor Ross Harley. He’s an artist, writer and educator in the field of new media and popular culture. His work and interests crosses the boundaries of media arts practice, cinema, music, design and architecture and his video and sound works have been presented in Paris at the Pompidou Centre, MoMA in New York and Ars Electronica in Austria.

He is a long term collaborator with Maria Fernanda Cordoso working closely with her in the new very famous Cardoso Flea Circus.
His publications include Avopolis, a multimedia project book on airports and an edited number of anthologies including new media technologies firstly, artists in cyber culture secondly and before and after cinema thirdly amongst a very long piece of publications.

He was the director of the influential International Symposium on Electronic Art, ISEA, in 1992 and is currently the co-chair of the forthcoming ISEA 13 entitled “Resistance is Futile” that will explode across many venues in Sydney next month from June 7 to 16. He has recently been appointed as the new Dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales. Please welcome Ross Harley

Ross Harley

Thanks very much Nick. Great to be here and welcome everyone on a Saturday afternoon coming out to hear people talk about such an amazing show that we have before us.
I’ve known John for a long time and I have to say this is the first time that I’ve actually been asked to talk a little bit about his work and in many ways I think of ourselves as fellow travellers. Although our work is quite different we have a similar background and I just wanted to touch on a few of those moments where John and I have worked and thought in a similar way in order to try and unravel, for those of you who aren’t so familiar with John’s work, the way in which John can be characterised as somebody who is a reader, a writer and an artist.

So when we listen to the great bio that Nic has given us earlier about all of John’s great work I think it’s worth reflecting on the way in which the things that John has done in the field of writing, in the field of thinking and in art making all intersect I think in a very interesting way. And often, when you go to John’s website there are lots of highfaluting references to great figures of the 21st Century, the 20th Century, the 19th Century and when I was looking at John’s latest work, the big installation out the back there called “Spiral of Time”, it reminded me that John also has an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the culture of the 20th Century in particular and in particular the history of cinema, all kinds of cinema, and the work that The Spiral of Time most reminds me of is in fact of a Roger Corman film called “The Man With the X-Ray Eyes” which was a classic cult but also pulp film from 1963. Roger Corman is the director and producer of schlock films, I suppose of B grade films, and I think John is somebody who is able to move across a range of different kinds of culture. So although he is very comfortable with philosophers like Deleuze or Guatarri or Baudrillard and other proper nouns he’s also ensconced in the culture of everyday life and of popular culture.

So I think John, the reader, the writer, the artist, is indeed the man with the x ray eyes. I think his vision of how we engage with culture and life is very incisive.
I also want to think about John in three different ways, so as John the reader, John the writer, John the artist.

So John the reader, many of you may not know that in fact John is a trained librarian and he, along with Carol, have worked in the library for many, many years, whether that’s as a job or whether it’s as pleasure and as something that has sustained his life for many years.

John is an incredible bibliophile. He’s a reader, he’s somebody who has an extensive knowledge of text but his understanding of text is not just the text of the book it’s not just the text that we will find in the library in the archive. John is not just a bibliophile in that classic sense he’s also a cinephile and a scholar.

John started his scholarly life in fact thinking a lot about another at the time despised filmic form, the film noir and John wrote an incredible thesis of film noir that’s never seen the light of day. I think we should ask John if he might, they failed him. There’s a long story there.

John understands film culture in a way that is unlike many others. He’s a lover of culture and he’s both a participant and an actor in the way in which we engage in that active process of reading. So John and his work shows us that reading is not just a passive act of taking a text which has come to us and consuming it. John and his work shows us that reading is something that’s very active and that it’s something that can be political and it’s something that is productive. In fact John’s participation in culture as a result of being involved in the films societies and the film scene of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s is that’s kind of where I first met John in the 1980s working on the independent film magazine that came out, the Sydney Film Makers Co Op called Film News and John was absolutely passionate about cinema of all kinds not just the trashy films of Roger Corman, not just the films of the immediate post war and the film noir but also of the avant-garde, the independent cinema and the works of Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Jean Renoir and all of those references that we see today in John’s works.

But in those times John started to write reviews for Film News and we would go and see films together, we’d hang out just around the corner at the Chauvel Cinema, we’d meet each other at the Cinematheque, we’d look at the films of Chris Marker and then I would read John’s musings in Film News. That was a scene that John was a larger than life figure and although we don’t see any references to this in the work that is in the present show, John in fact started to appear a bit like the figure of Antonin Artaud in Carl Dreyer’s “Joan of Arc”.
I remember one day going to a screening and seeing John Conomos appear as a figure larger than life in some of the early works of Lalene Jayammane and Tracey Moffatt. There’s an amazing scene, I think it’s in Bedevil where John performs himself but in this instance he performs himself as kind of a real estate figure, this menacing but also incredibly engaging character who just appears in this moment of the film which is quite amazing.

So at that time I didn’t really think of John as an artist nor had I thought of John as somebody who was working in that way but in fact this was the beginning, for me, the way in which John’s oeuvre started to emerge. It emerged out of a deep understanding of filmic and textual philosophical culture that he was immersed in. But he was also clearly immersed in a scene. John’s a convivial person who loves to talk, who loves to perform, who loves to engage in the world and I think that’s what we see in John’s works, although they may seem on the surface to be these intertextual pieces of work which refer endlessly to other works, in fact I think one of the things that we see is that there’s a deep engagement with the world around us precisely through this act of reading and then writing.

So John, the writer. I began to follow John’s works in Film News but also another little story, John’s probably forgotten this, but in the late 1980s I was asked to put together an independent, a book for independent film makers, it was called “Hands On” and it was one of these books that never saw the light of day and John and I worked together in putting together an annotative bibliography and so John read every book on independent film and then video production that was emerging at that time and wrote this, it was like a 20 page annotative bibliography where he’d read every book and then summarised it and put it into context for us and that’s what a lot of John’s work and writing does. He has a searing vision and he is an analytic reader who is able to synthesise these things for us.

So Hands On was a publication that never saw the light of day. What did see the light of day soon after was a publication called “Scan + ” and John was the editor of this and Scan + only had a few issues and it was associated with the then incredibly exciting emergence of the Australian video festival which again started live here in Paddington at the ChauvelCinema and then continued its life over at Glebe where John would go to the offices and run this publication.

Scan Plus is where John started to write about the amazing possibilities of the video and art, of video and cinema, of video and philosophy and although that’s not very well known a lot of that sort of work found its way into perhaps a far more easy to obtain publications of John’s, the incredibly important “Mutant Media” where some of the essays which were published there or some of the ideas which were forming in that period find their expression in a book which in fact it was Nick Sudos who commissioned that book and it’s thanks to Art Space that in fact John was able to collect his thoughts and put that work into the public domain.

For John, reading and writing, making art, it’s a bodily thing, it’s something which I think we can see as not just an act of performance but it’s an act of inserting yourself into the world and I’ll never forget John telling me about how painful it was to write that book. He had a residency at Art Space and he had to climb these stairs with these big heavy laptops back in those days, you know we didn’t have just a light iPad or whatever, heavy laptop and he had to literally struggle to write that book and it’s an amazing achievement.
That leads me to the third aspect of John’s persona which is John the artist and I think it’s the synthesis of John the reader, John the writer is indeed found in John the artist.

In the 1940s one of the influential writers who inspired many of the French new wave film makers in the late ‘50s, early 60s, was a person called Alexandra Astruc and he wrote this very influential article called “Le Camera Stylo” or the camera pen. This idea that you could write with a camera and this idea has inspired many people and none more so than John. I think John shows us how you can indeed write in this way that I’ve been talking about as somebody who knows how to read and understand the culture around us and our culture is nothing more than the sum total of what people have thought, what they have made and the artworks that they lead for us in galleries, in museums, in libraries and these are the places that John adores, these are the places that John frequents and that’s where John’s work comes from and I’m not saying that John’s work is in an ivory tower, I’m not saying that John’s work is somewhere other than everyday life, I’m saying that these are the places that inspire those of us who want to connect with the world in a deep and meaningful way, these are the places that allow us to battle against the endless amnesia that seems to confront us in contemporary life. We have no history, we have an erasure of memory, we struggle to remember what happened the week before last in politics or in art or in culture and John I think, John’s become more cantankerous in recent years, he’s become grumpy and a little bit angry at this loss of memory, at this loss of engagement in the great archives which our cultural institutions provide for us.

In saying that, I think this is how John manages to unify art and life, the everyday with the cultural, with the political and I think he’s done this in so many different ways and we can see the expression of that in the exhibition here.

We often think of John’s work as being biographical and that emotion of biography I think is incredibly complex. John, like many of us is a bit like the character in the Nicholas Ray film again from the ‘50s, “Johnny Guitar” the character who says “I’m a stranger here myself”. John is a stranger in these lands, you know these conceptual lands, but he wanders through them trying to make sense of them for himself and for us. What does it mean to be an Australian? We hate that question. What does it mean to live here in Australia at this time in this planet or in this world of culture which John connects to, that’s a question which we like to struggle with, that’s a question which has no real answer and to prolong that question for as long as we can I think that is the role of the artist and I think that this is something that John has absolutely struggled to achieve.

In that sense John unites a lot of art forms and philosophy and performance into the kinds of works that we see here. It’s not like this idea of the total artwork I suppose, it’s not that old modernist idea, but it’s something that I think that we can understand going back to this Spiral of Time work that I started reflecting upon. It’s a way of looking with the most searing vision, it’s a way of x raying culture or x raying our everyday life and to look across this landscape of time not just with our eyes wide open but with our eyes absolutely fixed upon those things which are most important to all of us in our everyday life.

So for that John I thank you.

The cinema is always as perfect as it can be.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image (1989)

I await the end of cinema with optimism.
Jean-Luc Godard, Cahiers du Cinema (1965)

Today, anyone who is interested in cinema and new media technologies will be used to frequently encountering mournful pronouncements concerning the impending death of cinema itself and the demise of cinephilia. It is argued, in certain circles, that old media (painting, cinema and photography) will soon become passé — that cinema will end because the emerging digital media will replace it or so radically reconfigure it that we, as filmmakers, critics, and spectators, will not be able to recognise it. This is one of the more spurious techno-utopian perspectives concerning the increasing interface between cinema and the new digital media.

The shape of cinema to come has always been open to question, despite the hype and hysteria colouring debates about it during the last decade or so. To some, it is a scenario of either nostalgic disaster (cinema will end as we know it or will be substantially impoverished) or utopian technological determinism (cinema will irreversibly mutate into cyber-cinema). Both scenarios are equally problematic, for many complex reasons.

What we are witnessing, in so many different contexts, is the definition of cinema expanding to include the new audiovisual media. This has been ongoing since the 1960s.

What this book attempts to do is to two things. First, it aims to address this continuing fragmentation of cinema in the context of the increasing ascendancy of new media in our private and public lives and the very recent phenomenon of visual artists resorting to cinema, its icons, narratives, genres and history in their artworks in the art gallery world. Second, it will gather some of my essays over the years, thus charting my own trajectory in terms of my cinephilia since the 1960s and my ongoing interests in film criticism and theory — and, since the 1980s, in video art and new media. In other words, this book is, in a modest way, an autobiography of sorts, of someone whose eclectic life as an artist, writer and educator centres around cinema’s grand, unpredictable adventure since its inception in the 1890s.

The book’s three sections document in their respective ways the complex ‘criss-crossing’ connections between cinema, video art and new media. Following Raymond Bellour’s passionate enquiry into the ‘in between’ images, sounds, forms and textures of the ever-present collision of cinema with video, TV and photography, Mutant Media attempts to show, in its cross-disciplinary acategorical emphasis, the value of seeing film and the screen arts as a continuing long conversation between these various media art forms. 1  Another significant assumption that informs the book is the belief (advanced by critics such as Bellour, Raymond Durgnat, Serge Daney, Manny Farber, Adrian Martin, Sylvia Lawson and Jonathan Rosenbaum, amongst many others) that there is great aesthetic, cultural and historical capital to be obtained by going beyond the traditional academic analysis of film as an aesthetic form and into the broader context of exploring images and their intricate, kinetic connections and relations in a convulsing image culture.

For me — someone who, like my ‘baby boomer’ peers, experienced cinema as celluloid-cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, and saw and heard its subsequent thematic, formal and stylistic changes and shifts over the following three decades — Jean-Luc Godard, as a (post)modernist voyager of the moving image, stands at the centre of the book’s theoretical architecture. Godard’s poetic probing of the medium’s future in his films and criticism since the 1950s is a testament to the developing convergence between cinema, literature, painting and video. He remains one of cinema’s greatest innovators and theorists, always exploring the archaeology of cinema as the expression of the memory and history of the 20th century.

More specifically, the various essays of Mutant Media reflect the many paths I have crossed over the years as an image-maker and critic engrossed in cinema in all its different contexts — art cinema, genre cinema, experimental cinema, etc — including its more recent ‘in between’ links with video and media art and its explosion into the art gallery context. Therefore the book also traces the mutation of the moving image via video and the new technologies across our cultural and media landscape.

As for the essays themselves, they repesent my life’s role as an artist-critic, and always as a cinephile, as a form of ‘aesthetic vagabondage’ (Jean Luis Schefer). 2  Here is criticism that still believes in the fragility and poetry of the moving image, and self-reflexivity, and does not succumb to any authoritarian meta-narratives of grand, totalising film and media theory. Criticism that is speculative, historically informed, modest and intimate with the dancing textures of image, sound, space and style of a movie in all its fleeting suggestiveness. Nothing less than what Manny Farber,whose own film writings are a kind of jazz-inflected film criticism and so acutely conscious of that multifaceted imagistic, sonic and especially spatial encounter between the film and the spectator, once said: that a critic — worthy of the name — needs to find the right kind of language to best describe the ‘struggle to remain faithful to the transitory, multisuggestive complication of a movie image’. 3  This is poignantly registered when Chris Petit meets Farber in his absorbing video essay Negative Space (1999), which is a homage to Farber and his idea of a ‘termite cinema’ and to Robert Mitchum as a cool noir icon performer in Jacques Tourneur’s 1947 noir classic Out of the Past. 4

When we speak of ‘the death of cinema’, we need to remind ourselves that since its beginnings as a popular cultural art form, cinema was always described as a medium without a future. Witness Louis Lumiere’s fatalistic statement that cinema was ‘an invention without a future’. But cinema is still with us today in all its splendid multiplicity. Reading cinema’s ‘tea leaves’ as and seeing a single doomed future is myopic and unhelpful, for the same was said when photography first appeared apropos of painting, or when the internet first appeared apropos of mail and newspapers. So it is more productive to speak of how cinema, already the bastard form of other hybrids (architecture, theatre, music, literature, radio, etc), something which is constantly underlined in Durgnat’s gloriously open-ended film criticism, actually has multiple futures in multiple forms due to its unpredictable encounter with the new technologies. This, now, is a commonplace statement to make, but 20 years ago that was not the case. Then it amounted to heresy: cinema having other futures than the one defined in its classical form as a mass art form projected in a darken auditorium? Back in the 1970s and 1980s, to even suggest to your cinephilic friends that video was a creative medium of expression would create moral panic.

But to people such as Raymond Bellour, Jean-Paul Fargier, Jean-Luc Godard, Thierry Kuntzel and Chris Marker, amongst others, video and cinema were not mutually exclusive art forms: instead, as Darke puts it, ‘“cinema” could provide a way of looking at the moving-image as it mutates across media’. 5  Thus, ‘cinema’ became, as I discovered in the last two and a half decades, a speculative and rhizomatic way of reading across film, video and new media. Being always suspicious of ‘border patrol’ orthodoxies, embracing video as a cross-disciplinary collage form of techno-creativity was a positive thing to do in the context of my cinephilia and film criticism, for it generated an anti-ghettoised critique of official culture and monocultural thought.

To have a lifelong passion for seeing and hearing cinema means that it quickens your heart and provides a ‘pillow-text’ road map for relating to the world at large and everything in it — it is a multifaceted phenomenological adventure giving form and substance to one’s personal life in a shared experience of spectatorship. Alas, what we are now seeing is that shared mass experience of film viewing undergoing severe changes — best epitomised by the sentiments of the above opening quotes. Because of corporate cinematic culture, media technology, changing demographics and globalisation, our opportunities to see classical cinema are becoming rarer by the day. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, cinema is not dying, as Rosenbaum argues in his sharp polemic Movie Wars (2000), despite the contempt that industry shows towards the spectator and how what parades itself today as film criticism and reviewing is nothing less than vapid ‘consumer guide’ rhetoric, cinema is alive and well beyond the multiplex theatres. It is living in other sites, such as cinémathéques, film festivals, museums and other national cinemas. 6

Therefore, as a consequence of the rapid convergence in the digital media and the related countless image systems of delivery and reception, classical cinema as we have known it over the last 100 years, with its clearly delineated Aristotelian dramaturgical and narrative form, is undergoing severe aesthetic and cultural anxiety. Critically, cinema, as defined by Jean-Luc Godard in his long-awaited (but rarely seen) autobiographical pun-encrusted Historie(s) du Cinema (1988–97) — film plus projection in a dark room — is being graphically problematised by the increasing use of film in the art gallery and the museum. Cinema space, cinema venue, cinema experience are all — to reiterate — being significantly affected (in a range of ways) by the computer, video, virtual reality, computer graphics, computer games, CD-ROMs, rock videos and the internet. New meanings, new contexts of distribution, production and reception, and new audiences are being formed. But this does not mean, as some of us may think, that the proverbial baby is being thrown out with the bathwater.

On the contrary, we are being challenged by these new developments in cinema and the emergent digital media culture to critique our own understanding of cinema as text and as an institution. This also means that we need to question our ability to analyse, interpret, observe and evaluate in a non-judgmental and sceptical manner. What we need to do is become curious, inventive, self-questioning and open-minded about our emergent audiovisual culture.

We have to be careful that we don’t impose aesthetic and cultural judgments on the new media that are more relevant to older media forms, just because we have as yet to establish accepted codes and conventions of ‘reading’ these new media works. We need to be alert to the ‘unforeseen encounters’ (Deleuze), the new regimes of signs that will come through the daily visible collision between cinema and new media. To do this we should address this new intertextual phenomenon in our camera-based arts in real time, in cultural, historical and social contexts.

Let us now reconsider the future of cinema in its familiar classical definition apropos its intricate relationship with the appearance of television in the late 1940s and 1950s. Cinema has been reinventing itself ever since. To some of us, the cinema in its nostalgic, warm and communal form of movie-going, movingly described by Roland Barthes in his extraordinary essay ‘Upon leaving the movie theatre’ as a curious cocoon-like hypnotic activity taking place in the dark anonymous ambience of a movie theatre, is being radically reconfigured today. 7  There are some who believe that it may vanish forever: time will tell, but I suspect it will remain with us for some time yet. It is interesting to note that for Barthes, who was not a film buff as such, and who once described film as ‘that festival of affects’, speaks of cinema as ‘that dancing cone which pierces the darkness like a laser beam’. 8  However, in telling contrast, television (which also shows films), for Barthes, has no compelling attraction, as the ‘darkness is erased, anonymity repressed; space is familiar, articulated [by furniture, known objects], tamed’. 9  Barthes’ evocative essay succinctly delineates the complex issues surrounding cinema’s fate during the latter half of the last century in terms of its increasing entwinement with the televisual and digital media.

Cinema and its uneasy complex dialectic with television is germane to a post-New Wave cinephilia: to some of us, cinema will always be our shared kingdom of shadows, where we dream our lives before the large screen of projected flickerings and shapes, whilst television and film-on-video are something quite different. Chris Marker quotes Godard in his CD-ROM Immemory: ‘Cinema is that which is bigger than we are, what you have to look up at. When a movie is shown small and you have to look down at it, it loses its essence … What you see on TV is the shadow of a film, nostalgia for a film, the echo of a film, never a real film.’ 10

Serge Daney, who became interested in the 1980s in exploring television’s impact on cinema, was intrigued by the silent immobility of movie spectators — the way they sat and watched, in a state of ‘frozen vision’ which has its own history. 11  Both Barthes’ and Daney’s observations about movie-going relate to the cinema we have known since the advent of the talkies. Now we live in an epoch where cinema is said to be fragmenting, mutating, via the rapid expansion of the new audiovisual media in our daily lives. As indicated earlier, cinema audiences, distribution and exhibition are changing, and the mixing of analog and digital technologies is now altering the colour, definition and grain of the cinematic image itself. Popular discourses about films, particularly those that belong to the so-called theme park cinema of spectacular digital special effects, morphing and the hyper-kinetic synthetic cinematic body, is dominated by the fetish of big box-office numbers. The digitalisation of cinema in the last three decades, as Alex Horwarth reminds us, may be attributed (amongst other things) to ‘visual experiences that stretch from the TV image of the first man on the moon to hip alienation effects in rock video, a kind of fungus or virus [that] has been eating into the once transparent movie image’. 12

But we are also witnessing, as Victor Burgin articulates in his recent fine study of how cinema has been scattered across a variety of media, plus fantasy and memory, the emergence of the ‘cinematic heterotopia’. 13  This follows Michel Foucault’s essay ‘Of other spaces’, with its valorisation of the concept ‘heterotopia’, a place of incompatible, juxtaposed sites. 14  Therefore, the ‘cinematic heterotopia’, according to Burgin, ‘is constituted across the variously virtual spaces in which we encounter displaced pieces of films: the Internet, the media and so on, but also the psychical space of a spectating subject that Baudelaire first identified as “a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness”’. 15

Once a film was experienced in a particular site, localised in space and time as a finite projection of a narrative; now, as we all know, film is no longer — as Burgin reminds us — something simply that may be ‘visited’ in the way one might attend a live theatrical performance or visit a painting in a museum. 16  In other words, a ‘film’ may be encountered as isolated iconic images, fragments or scenes in our everyday lives, in magazines, posters, on TV, on the radio, on the internet, in advertisements, newspapers, video clips, trailers, and now on our mobile phones, etc. Thus in the course of daily life we encounter a kaleidoscope of film fragments, which suggests vast aesthetic, cultural and technological implications for our understanding of cinema in the context of the new media technologies. And now, with a rapidly changing definition of ‘film’, film studies is confronting a heterogeneous ‘object’ which is equally confounding, as Burgin claims — photography and television studies. 17

Of course nowadays, the fragmentation of cinema offers a substantial challenge to academic film and media theory to eschew its past dogmatic theoretical fashions in order to come to terms with the notion that cinema today is something more than what is identified as the ‘classic’ narrative film. As Francesco Casetti puts it in his informative analysis of a half-century of film theory: ‘Now cinema is not even identified exclusively with movies … Experiences that cinema made known return in the form of exotic mass-vacations, in video clips, in the special effects of business conventions … Further, cinema in turn follows publicity, magazines, games, television. It no longer has its own place, because it is everywhere, or at least everywhere that we are dealing with aesthetics and communication.’ 18

Critics such as Bellour have been at the forefront of going beyond the limits of academic analysis of film as an aesthetic form. He has explored — in a broader context than celluloid-based cinema — images and their intricate relations in a transformative image culture. For Bellour, this has explicitly meant nothing less than a commitment to ‘saving the image’. 19  Meaning that we need to find new ways of talking about the image and new ways of seeing. And to seek to understand the diverse orders of hybrid images, structures and contexts that exist beyond classical cinema. In other words, we need to try to come to terms with the possibility that maybe film is ‘verging on obsolescence’, and that its values are vanishing with the rapid encroaching of the cinematic into contemporary art.

One of the essential reasons why cinema has been so radically reconfigured since the 1970s has been the ability of the VCR to allow us to personally manipulate the order of film’s narrative. This meant that for the first time one could accelerate and/or slow down a film. One could therefore ‘freeze’ a frame of film, view one’s favourite sequence or scene of film repeatedly, or simply, as Burgin notes, fixate upon an image. 20  Thus, Burgin argues, just as Andre Breton and Jacques Vache hopped from one cinema to another in Nantes in an afternoon — soon to become a favourite pastime of the French surrealists — one could now, with digital editing and personal computers, ‘zap’ through films shown on television and engage in a ‘sedentary version of Breton’s and Vache’s ambulatory derive’. 21
Consequently, Bellour’s attempt to find a new understanding of cinema’s transformation in contemporary screen culture and its new modes of spectatorship and participation in the context of its exploding diverse hybrid progeny in the art world is primarily based on (after Christian Metz) the recognition of the ‘still’. 22  Bellour was one of the first critics to probe what it means to ‘arrest’ the image; to stop the motion in order to unravel a film intricately, frame by frame, thereby, as Pavel Bucher and Tanya Leighton point out, making films ‘open to the critical means that [had] long been applied to still images’. 23

The power to slow down a film or freeze its pace for textual analysis was once reserved to academics and professionals who had access to 16 or 35mm flatbed editing tables, as Laura Mulvey reminds us in her fascinating article on the paradoxical tension between celluloid and new technology and its focus on the stillness of the movie image. 24  For Annette Michelson, cited in Mulvey’s eloquent article, these editing tables elicited in the user ‘the sense of control, of repetition, acceleration, deceleration, arrest in freeze-frame, release, and reversal of movement …’ 25  Nowadays, thanks to the new technologies, one can experience Michelson’s ‘heady delights of the editing table’ in exploring stillness as a property of celluloid cinema, and in the process become an inquisitive, ‘curious’ spectator — this, as Bucher and Leighton correctly suggest, is today’s artist, excavating historic cinema for its buried utopian fragments, forms, textures and spaces. 26  The curious spectator, for Mulvey, is therefore someone who realises — at the touch of a button these days — that time itself ‘can be discovered behind the mask of storytelling’, and that the new digital technologies are able to manifest the beauty of the cinema in the context of a new spectatorial experience that implies (by definition) a displacement ‘that breaks the bond of specificity’. 27  Following Bellour’s lead, Mulvey argues that a new paradoxical fascination comes into being when the movie image is stilled.

Thus artists working in video or multimedia installation are now, in the context of Mulvey’s argument for the emergence of the ‘curious’ spectator, exploring the possibilities of film — as an image, as a reference, and as a source of material — by affirming the ‘bond of specificity’ as it is being displaced in their new art forms, highlighting the distinctive time properties of video at the forefront of their mixed-media artworks.

Godard and Marker are two seminal filmmakers who experimented with the intertextual dialectics of the ‘still image’ and the moving image in their films and videos. Marker, like Godard, is a nimble ‘go-between’ between the cinema, video, photography and the digital media, and is adaptable to the convulsing new landscape of postmodern techno-creativity. Marker is concerned with the task of producing a small personal cinema — continuing the tradition of Alexandre Astruc’s notion of a camera-stylo cinema, but made possible by today’s digital tools. In other words, a cinema that is not like the grand auteur of the last century, but is nevertheless possibly a cinema of intimacy and solitude.

Marker’s oeuvre of the 1990s — including video and media installations such as The Zapping Zone and Silent Movie and CD-ROMS such as Immemory — is a fine illustration of specific artworks that have been exhibited in a number of different forms. Of course Marker is not alone in contributing to the mixed-media zeitgeist that prevails in the contemporary art world, aptly defined by Raymond Bellour as ‘the aesthetics of confusion’. Numerous filmmakers, new media and video artists and installation artists, such as Chantal Akerman, Peter Greenaway, Wim Wenders, Stan Douglas, Sadie Benning, Mona Hatoum, Gary Hill, etc., have in their respective ways contributed to this new aesthetic of mutating mixed-media artworks and presentation systems. 28

As the recent proliferation of electronic media challenges cinema’s autonomy, what exactly is happening with the filmic in art reasserting itself in the 1990s in the museum/gallery world? In other words, as Bellour puts it, when filmmakers such as Raul Ruiz, Raymond Depardon, Atom Egoyan and Harun Farocki, etc., agree to make installations, what is it that they are surrendering to? 29

How do we critique and relate to these new hybrid dynamic artworks of analog and digital media? And where is cinema in this vertiginous cultural landscape? Arguably, what we have been experiencing in the last 40 odd years is cinema and the emerging new technical media moving towards being part of the same developing multilayered narrative of audiovisual creativity. But at the same time, we need to be careful not to bypass analog media through the excessive valorisation of digital media. Promoting one without the other would be tantamount to creative myopia.

We need to remember that cinema, from its early funfair origins in the 19th century till the 1960s, uses numerous concepts, effects and techniques that were first articulated in that art form and are not necessarily evident in the new media arts. The question of cultural amnesia and ahistorical thinking is central here. How many of those who embrace video, film and interactive media installations know the significant film installations of the avant-garde cinema of the 19960s (Michael Snow, Paul Sharits, etc.)? And, indeed, how many know that the experimental cinema of the 1950s through to the 1970s, because of its collaborative multi-disciplinary nature and its modern mode of distribution and production, can (arguably) serve as a model for the digital arts of the last decade and a half?

What is critical to grasp, now more than ever, is the key notion that the screen arts in this digital age seem to be part of the one single system where each artwork consists of varying combinations of different art forms and media. Various commentators, including Bellour, Phillipe Dubois and Heinrich Klotz, to name but a few, have argued this kind of transgeneric point of view of old and new media. 30  For Bellour, contemporary cultural production is characterised by the proliferation of computer-mediated, non-binary ‘in between’ images, sounds and texts suggesting a particular reflexive, hesitant and fragmentary style of imagemaking indicating the legacy of the essay (Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Michel Montaigne, and Friedrich Nietzsche) as much as the ‘border-crossing’ aesthetics of camera-stylo-inspired cinema and video (Jean-Luc Godard, Thierry Kuntzel, Chris Marker and Orson Welles). It is a highly fertile cross-disciplinary concept of late 20th century media culture encapsulating an open relationship between creativity, speculation and risk-taking that is alert to the elaborate kinetic connections between the various art forms.

This particular self-reflexive, transgeneric form of imagemaking can also be best described, as Steve Fagin reminds us, as a ‘Northwest passage’ art form (after Michel Serres’ evocative ‘two cultures’ metaphorical description of travelling through the Davis Sound, which connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans), where the artist can travel freely across borders ‘without a passport’. 31  Indeed, it is essential to appreciate the intertextual alchemy that is occuring between old and new media on the same plane of multimedia creativity. We live in a post-computer epoch which is notable for its increasing, virtual life of simulation, high-speed information and global networks and it is important to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the exact and human sciences — we need to remember Serres’ multifaceted comparativism, which is based on the zigzag pattern of a fly. 32  This means having the ability to traverse many spaces of interference, located between many different things, making different connections. Serres’ distinctive indifference to temporal distance suggests that he can make unpredictable connections (all within the same timeframe) between numerous authors, texts, genres and myths.

For Serres, the past is never out of date, and nor is an art form such as classical cinema or video art: like Hermes (the operator who brings diverse things together), Serres’ provocative concept of a rapid time machine scanning texts and signs across different artistic, cultural and temporal contexts implies a fluid capacity to treat complex subjects with lightness, speed and simplicity.

This is one of the most critical tasks facing anyone who is interested in the screen arts today. We need to become switchboard operators across culture, space and time, and between analog and digital media; and we need to always question our own cultural baggage. This means becoming more ‘empirical’ and less theoretically certain of ourselves, letting go of our dogmatic certainties about the Cartesian method of philosophising and becoming more intuitive, self-critical and non-authoritarian, more alive to Wittengenstein’s challenge: ‘Don’t think, look.’ 33  To which we may also add, ‘and listen’. In other words, we need to become — in Nietzsche’s apt term — ‘experimentors’. 34

Bellour’s imaginative critique of the ‘crisis’ in the image in late 20th century culture, with its speculative emphasis on the different aesthetic, historical and technical ‘passages’ that are taking place between old and new media, is indicative of his fecund ability to explore film in the broader context of art, culture and technology. As a critic, Bellour’s work is exemplary, in that it focuses on understanding the ongoing fragmenting ‘unspeakable images’ that cut across film, video and the gallery. Thus Bellour, who was one of the first critics to see that cinema, video and photography were rapidly becoming intextricably linked to each other, was also one of the first to realise that cinema, in Darke’s words, had lost ‘its autonomy and is now one more station through which the image circulates’. 35  For Bellour, ‘the mixing, the contamination, the passage or movements between images that have accumulated at the convergence of three techniques and three arts: photography, cinema and video’ indicates that video is primarily ‘the agent of three passages between images’. 36  These mixed passages that are occurring in today’s dramatic computer-mediated collision between the camera-based art forms form the curatorial architecture of the 1990 Passages de l’image exhibition — which was curated by Bellour, Catherine David and Christine van Assche. The exhibition also pointes, as the curators suggest, to Walter Benjamin’s 1930 study of the arcades or passages of 19th century Paris and the beginnings of modern visual culture, as well as to Henri Michaux’s book of essays, Passages (1950), a work which vividly evokes (as Christopher Phillips puts it) ‘the fluid transitional zones of human consciousness’. 37

In order to appreciate the intertextual dialogue that is ensuing between traditional and new media it is crucial to note that they exist, in Klotz’s expression, ‘side by side’, in a non-mutually exclusive spirit. 38  More and more, we are aware of the significance of the intersections between the different forms of audiovisual representation and value seeing one media form through another. This is central to Philippe Dubois:

I have come to believe that it is no longer possible in today’s audiovisual and theoretical landscape to speak of art in and of itself, as if it were autonomous, isolated and self-defining … I think that we have never been in a better position to approach a given visual medium by imagining it in light of another, through another, by another, or like another. Such an oblique, off-center vision can frequently offer a better opening onto what lies at the heart of a system. Entering from the front door, where everything is designed and organised to be seen from the front, seems to me to be less sharp, less pertinent, less prone to yield discoveries than slipping in from the side. 39

It is precisely this non-purist point of view, this seeing of all media forms, that Dubois, along with Godard and Serres, amongst others, notes, that forms the developing narrative of audiovisual creativity. It is crucial to observe this, because it underlines how undesirable bypassing analog media for the valorisation of digital media would be. Godard is alive to the transgeneric wisdom of Dubois’ words. Regardless of the medium — film, TV, video and writing — Godard’s dazzling multifaceted oeuvre suggests an artist who is prepared to start from scratch, from zero, in making sense of the multiplying and fragmenting signs that surround him. Godard is prepared to think aloud, to stutter, and to see and hear what exactly is taking shape in front of him.

One critical reason, amongst many others, why Godard’s work is relevant today is that it raises far-reaching questions about cinema’s fate. Is it possible to make cinema in the age of the digital? Can cinema hold its own in the public spaces of spectatorship? Do cinema, video, television and digital media belong to each other? Does ‘digital cinema’ exist? These questions are essentially related to ‘the death of cinema’ debate of the last 40 odd years and salient to Godard’s art.

To speak of ‘the death of cinema’ as a collaborative popular industrial art form is, not after all, such a new thing. Anyone who cares for cinema and its historical evolution will immediately recognise this: cinema in all its splendid multiplicity, from the silent era to our present internet era of global media, will probably acknowledge this. Strictly speaking as, Michel Witte has recently pointed out in his lucid analysis of Godard’s wistful views on ‘the death of cinema’, cinema has died many ‘deaths’ since the 1910s. 40  Briefly, they include (a) the suppression of the vitality of the silent cinema by the ‘talkies’; (b) the failure of cinema in the face of the Holocaust; (c) the May 1968 critique of cinema as a reactionary cultural form; and (d) the disintegration of cinema by the omnipresent debilitating contagion of the televisual.

But also, there is some truth in Nicole Brenez’s idea that for certain filmmakers (such as Godard), ‘the death of cinema’ theme was a necessary and neat melancholic formula that helped them become productive as artists. 41

Brenez’s observation is significant because we need to remember that Godard, who has always championed, in Timothy Murray’s words, ‘the cinematic screen as an ontological foundation of the twentieth century’, was also one of the first to explore video innovatively — as early as Numero Deux (1975). 42  Thus Godard’s oeuvre is profoundly emblematic of cinema’s fate in its convergence with digital technology. Further, what Godard is lamenting is not, as Murray points out, videotech being ‘the debasement of the screen and its complex machineries of projection’. 43  It is cinema’s illuminated rectangular screen and the attentiveness of the cinematic gaze that are, for Godard, passing into today’s electronic screens of digital distraction.

When we speak of ‘the death of cinema’ we need to make a vital distinction between cinema as a social and industrial institution and the medium of film as art. In other words, we need to be precise about the fact that cinema and film are not the same thing. Film, for someone like Hollis Frampton, who was an eloquent practitioner of film as art and saw film as ‘verging upon obsolescence’ in 1975, is what takes form on the projected screen. 44  Frampton realised as early as the late 1960s, according to Bucher, how fragile film was: he maintained that ‘film is, first, a confined space … It is only a rectangle of white light.’ 45  Everything about film as an art form, including its limits, for Frampton, flowed from this illuminated rectangle and the film projector.

Today’s ‘death of cinema’ debate does not imply cinema’s imminent death, Far from it. This is a too simplistic view of cinema and its complex and shifting relationships with other media. When you hear suggestions of ‘the death of the novel’, ‘the death of painting’, ‘the death of photography’ etc., you can always be assured that there is some life left in the supposed corpse. It is naive, for a range of elaborate aesthetic, cultural and technological considerations, to believe that new media will automatically replace the old media.

What is interesting to observe is how many artists’ use of film in the 1990s — particularly Hollywood film, according to Chrissie Iles — is partly to do with their desire to connect to the idea of film as a socialising medium of communication. 46  Following Marshall McLuhan’s prediction in the 1960s that where the 19th century had been obsessed with privacy, the 20th century would be obsessed with communication, Iles argues that artists are seeking to engage with ‘the connective tissue that film creates’. 47  But the relationship between film and art is, by and large, a one-way street: artists love film, but the film world is often indifferent to this fact. Thus the art and film worlds have always represented (in Anthony McCall’s fitting words) ‘a double helix, spiralling closely around one another without ever quite meeting’. 48

Let us now return briefly to the essays in Mutant Media and see how they reflect the major thematic concerns of the book. In the first section, ‘Then and Now: Cinema’s Passing Shadows’, Chapter 1, ‘Cultural Difference in Contemporary Australian Cinema’, looks at the complex representation of ethnicity in Australian cinema since World War II and the development of certain non Anglo-Celtic filmmakers who were germane to the examination of this significant theme in their particular marginalised oeuvres. The chapter, aside from its brief autobiographical section concerning the author’s diasporic experience as spectator of Greek cinema in an inner-city cinema in the 1950s, also notes the many other filmmakers who were concerned with the inscription of ethnicity, class, gender and history in their works. Chapter 2 discusses Luis Buñuel’s only documentary, Land Without Bread, which to some is one of the first examples of the personal essay documentary form, and is a critical work in that it registers the intricate intersection between film modernism, surrealism and the essay documentary. The work is an emblematic example of the lyrical and anti-clerical surrealism that spanned the entire career of Buñuel, one of the key surrealist auteurs from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Finally, Chapter 3 in this section probes the elaborate links between contemporary art, cinema and the classic modernist works of Alfred Hitchcock. This chapter endeavours to create an overview of the recent mutating convergence between art, cinema and the gallery in terms of Hitchcock’s oeuvre.

To some, such as Godard and his Cahiers du Cinema associates, Hitchcock was the modernist filmmaker of the last century. Why is Hitchcock so attractive to contemporary artists working in photography, installation, painting and projection? And how significant is the role of art itself in Hitchcock’s oeuvre? Like Buñuel, whom Hitchcock admired a lot, Hitchcock spanned both the talkie and the sound eras.

This chapter encapsulates some of the critical concerns of the book: what is ‘cinema’, and why is it rapidly converging with other media? Addressing such important questions equates to nothing less, amongst other things, than engaging with the prophetic truth of Godard’s utterance: ‘We’re born in the museum; it’s our homeland, after all …’ 49  Why, after all, are we now — at this historical juncture — witnessing the increasing rich and overlapping convergence between film, video, new media and the gallery?

The second section, ‘Video Art: From the Margins to the Mainstream’, concentrates on the role of video art — a much misunderstood medium of techno-creativity, particularly in terms of its elaborate histories, effects and genres — in the latter half of the 20th century. Video is, as Bellour has eloquently argued, time and again, perhaps the medium that has been most responsible for the proliferation of complex ‘in between’ images between the various camera-based art forms — cinema, video, photography and television. Chapter 4, ‘Framing Australian Video Art’, is an exploratory investigation of the complex cultural, historiographical and technical questions facing anyone who is interested in looking at Australian video art, a subject that is ignorantly taken for granted, in the popular imagination, as a medium without a highly visible history or cultural memory. Given its ‘stop-start’ history of cross-disciplinary activity since the 1970s, with artists like Mick Glasheen, Jill Scott, David Perry and Steven Jones, etc., and the constant institutional refusal to archivally engage with its history, contexts and practitioners, one is obliged to contextualise video on a broad historical and political stage. Today, as this book argues, video is an essential feature of the contemporary art world. Nevertheless, there remains a substantial propensity amongst the younger generation of visual artists working in installation, photo media and mixed media, to reinvent the wheel as far as video is concerned.

Chapter 5, ‘Collage, Site, Video, Projection’, examines the importance of collage as a key facet of video installation art and projections in the last three decades or so of the last century. The chapter constructs an archaeology of sorts that addresses the complexities of video installation art as postmodern art form par excellence. Now, since the 1990s, time-based projections have become a commonplace genre of the international art world. Why are artists turning to the ‘cinema’ as a social experience and film as an art medium for their gallery video, film and interactive installations and projections? And how did installation art evolve from its early historical avant-garde contexts, and subsequently, in terms of postwar Euro-American avant-garde art — in particular, the Fluxus movement? What role did experimental cinema play in the genre’s overall development? Again, in this context, video (both as tape and as installation) has been a substantial agent in crossing film over into the contemporary gallery.

Chapter 6, ‘Border-crossing: Jean-Luc Godard as Video Essayist’, strives to locate Godard’s immensely influential oeuvre — especially, for our immediate purposes, his video and TV work as an essayist — in the context of today’s highly volatile audiovisual landscape. Godard is one of the greatest image-makers and thinkers about cinema and its futures. Godard’s cinema is pivotal to any rudimentary exploration of the image–sound–space transformation that is taking place today in our art, culture and society. He remains one of the supreme cinematic artists, whose profound ‘in between’ cinema addresses the complexities of cinema as a medium and as a collective experience. As an essayist, Godard’s art is intricately connected to the Montaigne–Mallarmé tradition of literature. While Godard linked Daney’s film criticism, which he described as ‘the end of criticism’, with a tradition that began with Diderot, one could also arguably locate Godard’s cinema and writings as belonging to this great ‘border-crossing’ tradition of criticism. 50  Thus Godard, who harnessed painting and literature to the cinema, remains one of cinema’s original explorers apropos its fertile interaction with other media.

In Section 3, ‘Liquid Screens: Art, Culture, New Media’, Chapter 7, ‘Australian New Media Arts: New Directions Since the 1990s’, delineates some of the more critical issues concerning the development of new media arts in Australia. It also looks at some young artists, both established and emerging, who have been exploring art and digital technology in their practice for the last decade or so. Australia, because of its unique geopolitical position, and its legacy of receiving ideas from Europe, Asia and America in a markedly sceptical and inventive fashion, has been one of the countries (like Canada) that is more receptive to experimenting with media art. Historically, Australian artists working in this area of contemporary artistic and cultural production have been, to date, far more numerically visible than their traditional national counterparts in media and techno-arts festivals around the world.

Chapter 8, ‘Entering the Digital Image: Jeffrey Shaw and the Quest for Interactive Cinema’, discusses the work of Australian artist Jeffrey Shaw in the context of his pioneering project to create interactive cinema. Shaw’s diverse expertise in media art since the 1960s underlines the shifting complexities of the artist’s life-long ambition to critique the illusionism of classical cinema by locating aesthetic, cultural and technical correspondences between old and new media in his multifaceted practice. Shaw’s art is a testament to his sophisticated understanding of how art, entertainment and technology have been interconnected since the Renaissance, in many intricate ways.

Chapter 9, ‘The Spiral of Time: Chris Marker and New Media’, discusses the elusive French filmmaker Chris Marker and his negotiation of new media in his work since the 1980s. Marker’s use of digital and video technology — installations, videotapes, CD-ROMS — is emblematic of his optimistic attitude towards ‘the death of cinema’ discourse of the last three decades or so — in radical contrast to Godard’s more pessimistic views on this important subject — and suggests that his editing and polemical work with André Bazin in the 1950s was an invaluable basis for his creative approach to new media. One of the major themes informing Marker’s recent media works is the cultural memory of technology.

Finally, the Conclusion, ‘In Transition, or, from Montage to Immersivity’, endeavours to succinctly sum up some of the more critical ideas informing Mutant Media’s major subject: the delineation of the ongoing convergence between cinema and other media and its vast implications for contemporary art practice, and how cinema itself, as a collective experience and as a medium, is undergoing profound aesthetic, cultural and technological changes. To understand how we are today encountering a pervasive complex transformation of the media — cinematic, televisual, photographic and videographic — that is always shaping art, mass culture and society, we need to remind ourselves that the media are always in a state of unpredictable transition.

Further, if cinema is — as some are saying — ‘verging on obsolescence’, what are the implications for our image culture? In what significant ways is the material complexity of cinema being affected by the new electronic and digital technologies, and what does this signify in terms of our more traditional academic analysis of film as an aesthetic form and the emerging desire to look at images in a broader discursive context?

We need to find new ways of looking at the moving image as it impacts across media. We also need to understand why film and art have been connecting to each other, over the last 20-odd years, in the performative space of the art gallery. Why are so many visual artists today raiding our archival memories of cinema — particularly Hollywood and, to a lesser degree, art cinema and avant-garde/experimental cinema — to create their installations and projections in our museographic spaces of the art world?

It is essential, therefore, for artists, educators, curators and spectators to see one media form through another, to practise an essayistic mobile form of image-making that hinges on a point of view that is highly elastic, always on the move, contesting the fixities of art, culture, society and technology. We need to insert ourselves into the intersections between media which initially seem to be antagonistic — through this we can explore multiple anti-binary meanings that cut across contexts, genres and forms that speak (as in Chris Marker’s La Jetée) of both the cinema and photography. It is this intertextual hybrid freedom of investigating the variety of possible rich relational figures and intersections that link old and new media, and their ‘zig-zag’ flights of highly mediated cultural expression that are embedded in Western representation, that remains such an untapped realm of critical enquiry and media experimentation.

1. Raymond Bellour’s critical work remains (despite the bulk of it as yet not having been translated into English) of crucial importance to anyone concerned with the fate of the image and its transformations in our recent audiovisual culture. Bellour’s profoundly prescient criticism stands next to Serge Daney’s criticism — they are in a class of their own. Needless to say, Jean-Luc Godard’s commentaries, both written and filmed, are also of profound importance on this subject. For a recent overview of Daney’s newly translated critical writings see Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘The missing image’, New Left Review 34, July–August 2005, pp. 145–51.
2. See Jean Louis Schefer, The Engimatic Body, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. xviii.
3. Cited in Chris Darke, Light Readings, London, Wallflower, 2000, p. 4.
4. British filmmaker/writer Chris Petit, in his recent work, particularly his collaborations with novelist/poet Iain Sinclair, is notable as film/video essayist who is concerned with his own past as a cinephile engaged in working with new technologies. Petit’s aptly named Negative Space has the same title as Farber’s monumental collection of film criticism, Negative Space, New York, Da Capo Press, 1998.
5. Darke 2000, p. 7.
6. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movie Wars, London, Wallflower, 2002.
7. Roland Barthes, ‘Upon leaving a movie theatre’, in Roland Barthes (trans. Richard Howard), The Rustle of Language, London, Basil Blackwell, 1986, pp. 345–49. Barthes’ essay is cited in Jonathan Rosenbaum, Placing Movies, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995, p. 53. For a recent valuable analysis of Barthes’ essay see Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film, London, Reaktion Books, 2004, pp. 7–28 and, especially, pp. 29–43. Burgin’s book is an important study of how we encounter in everyday life isolated fragments of films, iconic images or scenes that pervade our media.
8. Barthes 1986.
9. Ibid.
10. See Raymond Bellour, ‘Battle of the images’, Art Press 262, November 2000, pp. 48–52. Chris Marker’s comments are cited on p. 49. Many thanks to John Gillies for introducing Bellour’s article to me.
11. Ibid., p. 48. On Daney’s influential career as a post-New Wave critic, whose own critical trajectory existed parallel to the recent passage of the movie image itself in contemporary culture, see Darke 2000, pp. 69–75.
12. See Alex Howarth’s letter in ‘Movie mutations’, Film Quarterly, September 1998, p. 47. Also see Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin (eds), Movie Mutations, London, British Film Institute (BFI), 2003. This is a timely and invaluable account of contemporary cinephilia and ‘the death of cinema’ debate (viz. Gilbert Adair, David Denby, Susan Sontag, David Thomson, etc.) in the context of a changing world film culture. On the latter issue, see also Rosenbaum 2002, pp. 19–33.
13. Burgin 2004, pp. 7–14.
14. Ibid., p. 10.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., pp. 8–9.
17. Ibid., p. 9.
18. Cited in Burgin 2004.
19. See Raymond Bellour’s essay ‘Saving the image’, in Tanya Leighton and Pavel Bucher (eds), Saving the Image: Art after Film, Glasgow, Centre for Contemporary Arts/Manchester Metropolitan University, 2003, pp. 52–77.
20. Burgin 2004, p. 8.
21. Ibid.
22. Leighton and Bucher 2003, p. 28.
23. Ibid.
24. Laura Mulvey, ‘Stillness in the moving image: ways of visualising time and its passing’, in Leighton and Bucher 2003, pp. 78–89.
25. Ibid., p. 87.
26. See Leighton and Bucher 2003, p. 30.
27. Mulvey 2003, p. 81.
28. Bellour 2000, p. 52.
29. Ibid., p. 50.
30. See Raymond Bellour, ‘The power of words, the power of images’, Camera Obscura 24, September 1990, pp. 7–9; Philippe Dubois, ‘Photography mise-en-film’, in Patrice Petro (ed.), Fugitive Images, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 152–71; and Heinrich Klost is quoted in Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffman (eds), Cinema Futures, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 1998, p. 9.
31. See Peter Wollen, ‘An interview with Steve Fagin’, October 41, Summer 1987, p. 99. And see Michel Serres, ‘Northwest Passage’, Semiotext(e), vol. 4, no. 3, 1984, p. 67.
32. Michel Serres (with Bruno Latour), Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1995, pp. 65–70.
33. John Rajchman, ‘The lightness of theory’, Artforum, vol. 32, no.1, 1993, pp. 165–66, 206, 211.
34. Ibid., p. 211.
35. Darke 2000, p. 161.
36. Quoted in Darke 2000, p. 162. Original text is Bellour 1990, p. 7.
37. Christopher Phillips, ‘Between pictures’, Art in America, November 1991, pp. 104–16.
38. For Klost’s quote, see Elsaesser and Hoffman 1998, p. 9.
39. Dubois 1995, p. 152
40. Michael Witt, ‘The death(s) of cinema according to Godard’, Screen, vol. 40, no. 3, 1999, pp. 331–46.
41. Nicole Brenez, ‘Movie mutations’, Film Quarterly, September 1998, p. 48.
42. Timothy Murray, ‘Debased projection and cyberspatial ping: Chris Marker’s digital screen’, Parachute 113, 2004, p. 92.
43. Ibid.
44. Pavel Bucher, ‘Some notes on art as film as art’, in Leighton and Bucher 2003, p. 47.
45. Ibid.
46. See Chrissie Iles’ observations on film as medium for socialising and communication in ‘Round table: the projected image in contemporary art’, October 104, Spring 2003, p. 73. Organised by Malcolm Turvey and George Baker, this discussion group featured Hal Foster, Anthony McCall and Matthew Buckingham as well as Chrissie Iles.
47. ibid.
48. Ibid., quoting McCall, p. 74.
49. Cited in Jean-Luc Godard and Youssef Ishaghpour (trans. John Howe), Cinema, Oxford/New York, Berg, 2005, p. vii.
50. Ibid., pp. 9–10.

The title of my speech will become self-evident towards its concluding
paragraphs. George Alexander launched the book for me in Sydney and in
Melbourne, Adrian Martin, will launch it at Monash University (Clayton
Campus) on 28th August, 2008.”

“How do we know who copied what?”
Louis Armstrong

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed.
No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. “
Samuel Beckett

“ Our word ’history’ comes from the Greek word
meaning ‘enquiry.’ It embodies the assumption
that men and women are curious about life on
earth ; that they wish to question the dead as well
as the living, and to ponder the present and the
future as widely as possible from knowledge of the
past.”
Shirley Hazzard

Thank you for coming this evening. Much appreciated. Thank you, George, for your kind words.

For the last few months I have been rehearsing in my mind what will I say on this occasion ?  Words as usual will fail me. They always do. Like the time when Norman Mailer punched Gore Vidal to the ground, and Vidal stood up looked him in the eye and replied : “I see Norman, words have failed you once again.”

So the first thing I wish to do is to sincerely thank the people who made my solo book a publishing reality. The first two people I should acknowledge are the two Nicks in my professional life. Nick Tsoutas, who kick-started the book, by hassling me for close to four years to get something on a bookshelf. I am deeply indebted to him for this and supporting my writing and art since the 1980s.

Nick is, without any doubt, endowed with the best antennae in the contemporary art business in this country : I said it before and I say again :  it is uncanny, how he can sense things in our cultural zeitgeist like a bloodhound.

The second Nick is the late Nick Zurbrugg. I still miss him, his playful reflexive wit, generous encyclopedaeic erudition – grounded in Ezra Pound’s wisdom that is essential to speak to artists, poets and philosophers if you wish to write about them – and his unfailing nurturing belief in me as an author and artist. I miss his infectious zany humour and deep-seated curiosity about the world.

Brad Buckley and Helen Hyatt-Johnston need to be thanked next for their consistent concern – over a year to be exact – to see that I met the pressing publishing deadline. There were moments that I thought I was in an ancient Egyptian galleon with me chained below deck, next to Charlton Heston, and  them two above deck banging their drum with sadistic relish. Why guys ? Why ?

Indeed, I swear there were days as I would schlep my laptop computer on a trolley with an assortment of essays, documents, etc., strapped to it, going up and down the stairs in my ‘Foucauldian’ asylum-college building – shades of “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari’- morphing into a bloody Lamarckian orangantan !

I need also to thank Blair French, from Artspace  who graciously and professionally committed himself to the book, as did Victoria Dawson, from Power Publications, for supporting the book as well. Thank you. Both Blair and Rebeun Keehan, also from Artspace, need to be thanked for going over the manuscript with a fine editorial toothcomb.

In this context, I am also specifically appreciative of Sarah Shrubb’s consummate copy editing skills. Many thanks, Sarah.

And for the overall visual design look of the book I am indebted to Ricardo Felipe. You maybe wondering why I feature on the book’s cover with a trilby hat and a chess-board ? Well, aside from the image’s many modernist connotations, it is a comment on the fact that I am such a lousy game-player in the academy and the art and writing world.

A Keatonesque spear-carrier in the surreal grand opera of the academy.

More of this in a moment, boys and girls.

There is also one other person I should thank for his invaluable computer and publishing skills : I am speaking of Eddy Jokovich, who selflessly assisted me in shaping the manuscript into a passable one for publication. Thanks, Eddy.

I don’t wish to make this speaking occasion into a ‘theological’ litany of my many friends who have been a vital part of life on this planet. I don’t wish to bore you with many names. But you know who you are and I am always beholden to you for your constant companionship, laughter and shared experiences of this only one world we have. A world that as one gets older values it more as a shared world of aesthetic, cultural, dialogic and existential possibilities.

Two people need however to be singled out for encouraging and mentoring me to become an artist – writer many moons ago. I am referring to Laleene Jayamanne and Tina Kaufman. My heart-felt thanks to both of them.

For me art and writing are shadows on the wall of life. Friendship above these two any day of my life. Old-walrus himself, that dependable light-house keeper of our darkness, Friedrich Nietzsche was on the money – as usual – when he said : “ Should life rule over knowledge and science, or should knowledge rule over life ?  Which of these forces is higher and more decisive ? No one will doubt : life is higher, the ruling force , for any knowledge that destroyed life would simultaneously destroy itself. Knowledge presupposes life, hence it has the same interest in the preservation of life that every creature has in its own continued existence.”  (“On the Utility and Liability of History for Life.)

How many of us have taken heed of Nietzsche’s words ?  Particularly inside and outside the academy : how many of us as artists, academicians and authors clamber over each one in our obscene haste to create a CV mythology that is frequently peddled to the highest bidder in Bertold Brecht’s marketplace of daily whoring. We speak of the art of seeing and the art of hearing, but how about the art of whoring ?

Forgive me if you think I am being sanctimonious here : I too am a whore : all of us, if I may say so, some more than others, are somehow complicit – in the Sartrean sense – with the engulfing global free-market ideology that is seeping in our universities, museums, cultural institutions, cultural industries, etc. This is not new news, as we all know. It is just that reflexive knowledge, and self- and institutitional critique are rapidly receding into oblivion.

The reasons for this are many and complex. Global education of varied and dubious critical scholarly standards is spawning the spectre of the educator as a kind of corporate conquistador flittering from one tertiary site to another as if they are on an elevator to celebrity stardom.

I do also deeply care about the persistent problem of cultural amnesia that is unfortunately becoming the norm in our professional and private lives.  When the so-called literary editor of one of our national broadsheets wanted me , last year, to prove to him the current relevancy of Orson Welles to his weekend readers I was speechless. “Prove to me, John, that he matters and I might publish your book review.”

I can give you many examples from the art, academic and writing world of this critical blight that – sadly – as Shirley Hazzard’s words cited at the beginning of my talk acutely delineate – is still with us today. All of us I believe – well most of us who do give a damn about it (contra to one of my colleagues who informed me that it was my problem as an educator and not the student’s)- are daily challenged to address this pernicious problem.

Read anyone on this issue – Sande Cohen, Andreas Huyssen, Julian Stallybrass, Regis Debray, George Steiner, Roy Ascott, Jonathan Rosenbaum, or who ever you care to choose, the consensual perception of this problem is, to put it mildly, dispiriting. My saying, boys and girls, “Today’s academic : Krusty the Clown” is rapidly becoming an emerging dominant reality..

Last month, in Dallas, I had the exquisite pleasure to hear Mary Ann Caws speak on the French surreal poet Robert Desnos. That was what she did – just spoke to us without engaging in an embalming exercise of theoretical peformance anxiety. Dotting her ‘i’s and crossing her ‘t’s.

It was like a sea-breeze in the mausoleum of the academy. Art history as cultural conversation – as if in a café, across your table- speaking to you as a friend would. How many of our art historians are, at the same time, discursive art critics ? You can count them on your two hands if you are lucky.

I exaggerate, of course, as I do, but you get the point.

Mary Ann Caws is a theorist – translator who is , mercifully, not a monologist  and who is generous – that word again, boys and girls – with quoting other theorists, writers and critics in her books and talks.

Today, alas, Jack Benny’s famous quip – “He would not give the parsley off his fish to you”- is so true in our art, academic and writing world. Like a bunch of dogs fighting over a bone in a Sam Peckinpah film.

Welcome to our global world of panoptioc Fordism. No time, boys and girls, to interact with, to fracture Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s apt description of the world, as one being of winds and stars and tides. No time, boys and girls, too busy, too busy.

The other day we were engaged in one of Sydney University’s massive “Little Britain” halls, where, boys and girls – you better believe  it – it was like a kresh for toddlers schooled in the hideous ‘edu-speak’ discourse of how one can get more creative, more innovative. In other words, tautological twaddle.  During the first morning session, one of my colleagues said to me that the acoustics in the place was bloody awful.  “We can’t hear one another, John..”  I replied wearily “it does not matter we are in the academy after all.”  Who is listening to whom these days?

I swear that there were moments as we were being hypnotised into a state of “Mickey Mouse” infantalisation , I thought that high up in the rafters of the hall, lurked Charles Laughton as the Hunchback of Notre Dam who was drooling in potential disappointment because he may have missed out on his professorial appointment as he was about to lurch downwards to us with his bell rope seeking a re-marking of his PhD thesis on the idea of the Medieval Origins of the University as a sanctuary for free independent thought !

The spectre of Hannah Arendt’s face has been haunting me ever since I first saw her in a British television interview in the early sixties. It was in my godfather’s house at Einfield. My godfather, Archie, was a magician with the Greek language of his rembetiko childhood in Piraeus in the 1920s. He was, bless his soul, a Joycean dazzler with Greek and English words : colliding them together as biting absurd, funny and obscene hybrid creations. (Paul Carter are you listening?) Words, for him, were like a soothing balm to him to counter the boredom of working in a milk-bar, seven days a week.

Pierre Bonnard painted against the monotony of life, Archie was a mesmerising word collagist for the same reasons.

He had many wonderful sayings which I can still recall from the 1950s and ’60s. One of which was “I am talking and only my arse is listening.’,

How prescient were Archie’s words for our modern times !

If you ask me “what is art and writing to you ?” All I can feebly say it is the only way I know best how to interact with this world. I am compelled to do so. If I had my choice, believe me, I would rather go fishing – which I should do more of these days – but I write and create images because I have to.

It is that simple and that complex. As John Cage use to say, enigmatically, “nothing more, nothing less.”

But I assiduously believe that one is obliged to to treat the past, the present and the future as one continuing dialogue of possibilities. Being alive to our one shared world. Treating the past as part of the present. In other words, boys and girls, believing in (to use Octavio Paz’s words) “an antiquity without dates.”

In the late 1970s Susan Sontag was once asked what is the role of an artist or a writer in modern society ? Sontag, who certainly lived up to her following words, replied that it was to pierce the narcotic veil that society produces on a daily basis and to show the possibilities of another world. I’ll buy her words as to why I create and teach.

(Sontag, according to her friend Richard Howard, the pre-eminent critic-translator of French literature, would actually lose weight as a consequence of her writing spells. Fourteen or fifteen drafts of an essay and then she would collapse into a heap on her floor totally exhausted.)

Since my bicultural childhood at Tempe in the 1950s I was always aware of being a hybrid alien who, in order to survive the ideological contradictions and fictions of my life, Stanley Cavell’s fitting expression of “being a stranger to oneself’ comes to the fore in this context. I would always read between languages, between cultures, between art forms.  I have been doing this all my life : rummaging amongst the dustbins of various art forms, genres and cultural contexts.

I cling to fragments, essays, aphorisms, quotes, and digressions like a marooned sailor does to floating wreckage.

The artist –writer as self-interrogator.

Art and writing, have always been for me, shadowed by the otherness of becoming, culture, history, gender, and power.

Indeed, both activities share a perennially nagging, half-glimpsed, striving towards an undecided elsewhere.

As I get older, as expected, I don’t give a damn. A rat’s arse maybe more appropriate. I speak my mind more freely.

Writing and making art for me is, on one level, creating works against forgetting. You may say what folly is this, but friends, it is something that I am compelled to do so. Kafka, once described his nocturnal feverish writing, as an act of “interior emigration.”   This is something dear to my life : crossing across many different kinds of cultural, linguistic  and psychic borders in my life’s journey.

Now I wish to finish my “Mister Natural” soapbox performance and thank my immediate family for all they have put up with me through the years.

I wanted to play Tony Bennett, the last of the existential crooners, singing Duke Ellington’s “Day Dream” but she forbade me from doing so. Too corny, she said. “Okay, maybe you are right, Carol”.  However, what remains for me to say about Carol is her truth-seeking eye and inconclusive heart have always anchored me, over the many years, in the flux of my life.

“Yes, Carol, I will put my books back in my study.”

To Joel, who I taught to play chess at the age of fours years old, and would methodically beat me every time since, a veritable spatial dancer of the chessboard, if there ever was one. Recently returning from his ‘grand-tour’ of Europe last year, he said to me how he saw a few of Luis Bunuel’s films in Spain, and how he thought that he understood me a little better because as he put it, “Dad, to you movies and books are like the air you breathe and the water you drink.”

To Mahla, who also returned from her “grand-tour ‘ of Europe this year, I must thank her also for putting up with me all these years. Apparently, as I found out through an email sent to me from one of her friends seeking advice about art colleges in this country, she did an impromptu performance outside the Tate Modern by rolling down a hill. According to her it was her critique of contemporary art. Mahla, I replied, the first law of creative life as an artist is you need to get inside that elusive white cube space of recognition.

Recently, Godard went to New York by plane from Europe and on his way back he chose to return by boat, Asked why he took the boat Godard replied “To see an open sky.”

How many of us today see an open sky ?
Thank you for coming.

John Conomos, April 1 2008.

“Nietzsche said a hundred years ago, “God is dead”. I say now, “Paper is dead…” If Joyce had lived today, surely he would have written his Finnegan’s Wake on video tape…”
Nam June Paik

Jean-Paul Fargier as a video artist, critic and polemicist is, without a doubt, one of the most eloquent voices to be heard in video. What I propose to do today is think aloud in open-ended terms concerning the invaluable role Fargier has (to-date) played in shaping some of the more salient aesthetic, cultural, historical and technological aspects of video as a dynamic contemporary art form.

Indeed it can be argued that Fargier’s role as one of Europe’s foremost video critics responsible for helping to forge the basic vocabulary of video criticism merits substantial discussion in itself because of his singularly visionary outlook on the medium. Since the early days of 1968/69 Fargier took up militant video with Danielle Jaeggi and others and constituted to Cinethique espousing an Althusserian mode of political modernism in contemporary film theory 1 .

I don’t intend for a moment to analyse in substantial detail Fargier’s insightful, witty and pun-encrusted critical writings on video (that is project worthy of another occasion). Let me say that since the late sixties and early seventies Fargier as a videaste and critic/theorist has been steadily opening up new uncharted vistas of formal and theoretical possibilities in creating and discussing the dancing audio-visual surfaces and multilayered conceptual architecture of video as a medium of postmodern creativity. Fargier’s epistemological, formal and poetic capacity to formulate new questions that lead to other new unsettling questions about the concepts, forms styles and elastic compositional possibilities of video and its complex mutating connections to cinema, literature (especially as analysed in the poststructuralist traditions of Barthes, Sollers and Tel Quel and their valorisation of ecriture as a contemporary avant-garde literary practice in the wake of modernism), the visual arts and the new media technologies (specifically radio and television) is something that is always foregrounded in his own innovative theoretical and videographic practice. Fargier’s literary based, elegantly orchestrated videos are notable for their deceptive Bunuelian simplicity of framing profound aesthetic, cultural and metaphysical questions in startling refined and fecund aural and imagistic configurations. Moreover, it’s a bold adventurous videography that is characterised by a highly malleable use of pictorial space (and the attendant plastic capacity to generate volume out of space), and most significantly, it is primarily concerned in articulating a post-Gordian poetics of electronic image-making which clearly conveys the imaginative risks in crossing the threshold of the sayable. Fargier’s luminous art constitutes a grand moving experimental inquiry into the very nature of image and sound which (to quote Jean-Luc Godard) suggests “traces that resemble us” 2 . Image-makers like Godard, Chris Marker, the Vasulkas, Thierry Kuntzel, Bill Viola and Robert Cahen are all fired by the same common dream: to make art as if witnessing the birth of the image itself. In Fargier’s case, whether it’s elaborately fluid and conceptualised videos or his inventive criticism (not to stretch a long bow here) he represents the conscience and memory of video. This is particularly evident in the historiographical, theoretical and visual concerns of a critically significant video like Joyce Digital (1984) of Play it again, Nam (1990).

Though Fargier is often seen to be highly articulate defender of European narrative and major innovator of the literary video, it is fairly important to italicise that his experimental significance as an image-maker focuses primarily on his sustained imaginative desire to locate some of the more critical principles of video as they particularly apply to the spoken word. Fargier in his prolific oeuvre specifically in major works like Robin des Voix (1987) – which I shall focus upon later – Joyce Digital, Robin Texto (1987) and Things Seen (1985) is motivated by a fundamental question: how best to use voice in video 3 ? His answer is to deploy sparingly rare and beautiful images and manipulate them in a fashion reminiscent (in the words of the artist) of a “a horse running” 4 . Images that evolve gradually demonstrating video’s entrancing ability to show, quote Thierry Kuntzel, “the time time takes to pass” 5 .

Having said this I wish now, at this early juncture, to discuss (in an explorative speculative manner) Fargier’s oeuvre a propos of his influential experimental role as someone who is engaged in enhancing the aesthetic, cultural and technological potential of video as a poetic and supple form of electronic writing 6 . Significantly it can be argued that Fargier’s videos exemplify an immensely refined and suggestive kind of image and sound writing that endeavours to speak of the personal, the fragmentary and the invisible with the conceptual and formal freedom of a Raoul Ruiz movie. His video work represents an electronic calligraphy of the experimental and the personal affording Fargier much invaluable authorial and intertextual freedom to examine ambiguities of gesture, abstract and figurative configurations, playful conceptual irony, documentary forms, chromatic expressionism and the important related capacity to make the image appear and disappear.

Fargier as an explorer of video form is interested in examining the notion of video as electronic collage (through Fargier’s situation his concisely constructed sonic based collage stylistics are characteristically understated in the mise-en-scene of his video image) and has discovered the imaginative and stylistic riches inherent in manipulating, distorting, cutting, colourising and collaging video’s electronic signal. The video artist’s supple and thought-provoking image-making is engaged on an affective and conceptual level how best to render the invisible visible : how best to create a video stylo form of electronic writing that gives one an infinite range of exciting pliable compositional possibilities.  In other words, to produce an electronic language of polychronic and polytropic concepts and forms. As coined by Peter Weibel polychromic refers to “ the rate at which various images appear, their order and speed” ; while polytropic refers to the ability of video to “contain many planes of information, subject, image, and even concepts of time, such as present, past, future, and dream, within one space’7 . Both concepts denote rhizomatic collisions of time, space, colour, light, form and image.

Of crucial importance is how Fargier’s far-reaching enterprise 9in our post-semiotic age) as a nomadic cartographer of the human imagination suggests an artist who is endowed with the playfully subversive capacity to disrupt and question traditional modes of image-making.

He is an artist who is distinctly familiar with the fundamental aesthetic, audio-visual and technological ideas that characterise video’s postmodernist aesthetic of temporality and its intricate legacy to classical literary modernism (Eliot, Joyce and Pound – especially Joyce in the wake of Paikian video and McLuhan’s conceptualisation of modern media consciousness) and the emergence of the new technical media during this century and their decisive impact on the formation of the early avant-gardes of modernism (Futurism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism and Constructivism 8 . Further, Fargier’s videos are often specifically made for television (fuelled by the belief as he once put it “The motor of the history of Video Art is the desire to merge with the optimum yield of the Machine Television”) and the more familiar institutional parameters of the international video world 9 . Critically his videography (like Duchamp’s art and Goddard’s image-making) represents criticism art 10 . The conceptual and stylistic architecture of Fargier’s art video is clearly recognisable for its pronounced impulse to define a new poetics of transubstantiation (articulated in Robin des voix, Robin Texto, Joyce Digital, and most directly, in Trinity, 12H 10 (1989)) that has been forged in creative solitude and shaped by Mallarme’s quest for The Book and by the perennial desire to locate and magnify new lyrical and resonant images and sounds emanating from a given literary text (which according to Fargier already constitutes ‘a formal organisation of reality’) 11 . Thus Fargier is preoccupied with Bachelard’s challenge of encountering a blank page as an opportunity to dream, to generate a new creation, a poetic synthesis of image, sound and written text that speaks of the artist’s trajectory to question orthodox ideas about the elaborate mobile relationships between literature, radio, television and video. To enunciate diacritical insights into our prevailing orders of discourse and vision, insights which characterise the image as luminous form and spectacle. This means a yearning to critique the limits of western representation (language as mimetic form) and also the chance for the artist to delineate a multiplicity of advanced ideas, forms and styles commenting on the manifold energies, forces and vibrancies that occur in images and sounds.

Fargier’s videography is situated somewhere (as he once indicated) between Godard and Averty 12 . Central to his art of video is his consistent neo-Paikian objective of analysing the conceptual, visual and radiophonic ramification of Joyce’s (post) modernist aesthetic of discontinuity, double-voicedness, space as space-time (something which has broader implications here, as Maureen Turim has recently outlined, reminding us that modernism in the visual arts emphasised a well-defined interactive relationship between temporality and spatiality) and relative simultaneity 13 . Therefore it is important to note that the Joycean/Paikian connection to Fargier’s oeuvre emblematised in ironic, playful and suggestive terms in Joyce Digital and more recently, in the artist’s own documentary portrait homage to Paik in Play it again, Nam depicting Paik’s performance homage to Beuys centres around Finnegan’s Wake (Fargier’s description of the novel as a “nocturnal remake of Ulysse” is quite apt given the function of collage aesthetics and the double operating in both Joyce’s and Paik’s work) 14 . Finnegan’s Wake’s valorisation of Joyce’s aesthetics of impenetrable decentred heterogeneity, chance, indeterminacy and strategies of hesitation has not only coloured Fargier’s and Paik’s work, but it has been instrumental (to a considerable degree) in influencing the overall concerns and direction of contemporary video.

Another noteworthy thing to understand here about Fargier’s experimental and genealogical role as video artist and critic in the context of Joyce, modernism and Paikan video in his acute reflexive realisation that video’s history and matter can be seen to be related (to quote Katherine Dieckmann) to “ the history of electrical inventions in art which can be interpreted as a series impulses towards the creation of an image-producing tool, towards video” 15 . This is explicitly concretised in Robin Texto where Jean-Claude Galotta blows at a swinging suspended electric bulb representing video’s modernist preoccupation with electricity in twentieth century art. (Let us also not overlook the frequent vivid motif of electricity at lighting that informs the audiovisual stylistics of Joyce Digital). The light bulb image-one of many that characterise Fargier’s video- indicates to us that video as a dominant time-based art form of representation –production endorses the main idea of art as a synthesised process of audio-visual information; a notion that emanates from Duchamp’s aesthetic of delay, response and stasis as much as it does from the Bauhaus experiments of the twenties, Fluxus, machine art, (post) minimalism, kineticism and the ‘death of modernism’ in the late sixties and seventies 16 .

Thus when we examine the alluring stylish surfaces and engaging polyphonic registers of Robin des Voix (made in collaboration with the dancer Jean-Claude Gallotta) we can read it as a lucid poetic summation of the artist’s post-Paikian negotiation of video’s cultural logic and its (post) modernist “origins” and history as being grounded in television (more specifically video’s anti-television dynamic)- and most fundamental to his project as an image-make in radio (as defined by modernism). Fargier’s subject in this pivotal tape focuses on the poet, translator and ‘radio listener’ Armand Robin and his “spiritual” obsession to study radio stations all over the world (particularly those situated in communist countries during the Cold War in order to analyse their official lies). This is a mesmeric lyrical poem of obsession, redemption and passion (testifying to Robin’s undying solitary pursuit (echoing Bresson’s dying priest in Diary of a Country Priest (1950). Robin, for Fargier, represents an “originator” of video art, a pre-McLuhanite medium/seer of radio technology.

Fargier’s describes Robin’s bodiless presence (we can only hear his ghostly posthumous voice and the babel of foreign tongues coming from a radio set sitting n a set of bookshelves) as “radioscopy” 17 . From the opening scenes (not too dissimilar to those in Gary Hill’s Incidence of Catastrophe (1988/89) where an illuminated book becomes a radiophonic object) we see Gallotta (as Robin) tapping on a set of books and flicking through a number of them creating a polyphonic translation of literature into sound (radio) in these subtle scenes of Robin’s driven objective to open up radio as a medium for creative expression and salvation, as a medium to dissect to doxas and rituals that govern everyday life ; we encounter the Poundian view of the “mediumistic artist” whose faculties have been extended by new technical media (especially radio) and who has the capacity to divine the presence of death and to be in contact (in the words of the poet) with “dangerous psychic beings who are assaulting the planet, making humanity become obsessed, looking for entire nations to subjugate their minds, to devour, to make them go arid”18 .

The video’s highly elaborate visual and sonic configurations are based on Fargier’s discovery that the energy of sound allows him ample conceptual and textual freedom to invent new audio-visual forms that provide an informative resonant commentary on Robin’s art and life and simultaneously disseminate critical ideas and observations about the medium’s complicated and multi-determinate heterogeneous links with literature, radio and television. Central to Fargier’s videography is the fundamental appreciation of the liquid reciprocity that exists between image and sound. This is something clearly delineated in image process video (the Vasulkas, Paik, Ed Emswhiller, Stephen Beck, Eric Seigel, etc), but more significantly in terms of electronic image-making, it is something that has wider profound ramifications for anyone wanting (as Fargier puts it)”to gain access to the invisible” 19 . For Sollers: ” everything we see is sound” – that is one side of the coin –the other is Godard’s precept that everything we hear is image 20 .

As Robin twirls the dial of his radio set during his exhausting nocturnal bouts of, radiophonic séance with the world, we hear many phantom voices (suggesting the haunting “operatic” sonic architecture of Woody Vasulkas Art of Memory (1987) and the melancholic stream-of-consciousness voice-over of Ken Koblands FotoRoman (1990). Voices that are recognisable for their atmospheric cultural and historical registers of the social and political upheavals of the twentieth century life: voices that Robin passionately analyses for their linguistic richness and aural bliss (like Finnish language).

Listening to Robin’s own evocative voice in conjunction with the other voices that he listened to for over 25 years suggests the Poundian metaphor of the radio as a medium releasing certain demons or energies from the past (a metaphor that connotes McLuhan’s notion of the radio as a “magical transformer” with the unique force to “ tribalise mankind”) 21 . Further, the very presence of the human voice (from the past) and its agile and fertile use in Robin des Voix and Robin Texto augments the inscription of culture, history and time in the spectral textuality of the soundtrack. When we listen to the radio and televisual voices in both videos (concentrating on the textual dance, gestures and rhythms of the voices)- and not forgetting the musicality of Joyce’s own voice in Joyce Digital- we are reminded by Regis Durand’s perceptive remarks about the incorporeal presence of the human voice in a (written) text? The ghost of a presence, the ghost of a voice; a trace, a golden, invaluable deposit, angel dust. But also a space, a stage where transactions of all kinds, trades, take place: a dispositive” 22 .

The Joycean/Paikian problematic takes many different forms in Fargier’s oeuvre : for instance, it is interesting to observe that in Robin des Voix that Robin’s radio changes into a television effect when we see black and white documentary footage showing French paratroopers descending into a Vietnamese sky. This radio/TV effect shapes (quite dramatically) the video’s liquid audio-visual stylistics. It is also significant to mention that Robin (like Paik and Vostel in their Fluxus days when they are concerned with the deconstruction and demystification of TV) manipulated television’s electronic signal. In Robin Texto also television starts to creep in when we see Robin watching television which is showing black ad white documentary footage illustrating the Algerian Liberation crisis before he was killed by the police in 1961.

Finally, one last point needs to be said relating to Fargier’s debt to Joycean modernism: the several vividly atmospheric scenes depicting Robin (Jean-Claude Galotta) in Robin des Voix as a dancing figure whose body is encrusted with black and white documentary footage showing Stalin (?) – a prominent visual effect in image process video (Emswhiller, the Vasulkas and Paik)-are rich for their Joycean connotations. The encrusted image of Robin dancing between his bookshelves and a transparent lantern with several bold rays of light cutting across his mobile body is critical in that it uncanningly resembles Joyce’s influential collage method of composition. According to Guy Davenport Joyce’s modernist literary style centres around the emphasis of projecting “images transparently upon other images, which in turn lie transparently over other images, which several piles deep” 23 . Davenport’s succinct characterisation of Joyce’s technique of collaging is apt in the context of Fargier’s use of video collage aesthetics as defined by his penetrating understanding of Joyce, modernism, the new media of cinema, radio and television and their invaluable specific contributions to video.

Fargier’s art represents an ongoing cartography of seeing and hearing new images and sounds that are barely visible and audible in our moving-image culture. They belong to the birth of anew poetics of audio-visual writing. Something that is heralded in the sublime opening shot of a plane and its milky white vapour cutting across a blue sky in Godard’s Passion (1982) or in his recent video The Power of Words (1988) where we see a fiery sun superimposed over a close-up of film going through an editing machine. Two hieroglyphs of an image (Barthes) that pose the question: what does it mean to create an image, a sound? Fargier’s is a video voyager creating a new art that is open to change, open to the enthralling adventure of giving form to the invisible. I believe that Fargier’s contribution to video will (one day) be measured in these terms.

(Thanks to Brian Langer (Electronic Media Arts Ltd, Sydney (Australia), for his helpful comments about Fargier’s work in the context of French and European video.)

1. For background information on Fargier’s role at Cinethique and his polemical endorsement of a “dialectical materialist cinema” see D.N Rodwick’s indispensable the Crisis of Political Modernism, Urbana and Chigaco, University of Illinois Press, 1988, p83-89. Information concerning Fargier’s early video work with Danielle Jaeggi (in the latee 60s) obtained from an interview conducted with the video artist in Sydney, 4th September, 1988 under the auspices of the Third Australian Video Festival.
2. Quoted in Jean-Louis Leutrat, “Traces that Resemble Us : Godard’s Passion”, Substance, vol 15 no3, p38.
3. “Voice” in this context maybe conceptualised as dialogue or a synthesis existing between the literary author and the video artist as Janet Sternburg points out in her essay “A Blank of New Things” in Kathy Rae Huffman and Dorine Mignot (ed). The Arts for Television, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles/Stedelijk Museum, 1987, p52.
4. Quoted in Brian Stonehill, “The Peacemaker” PASSION, April 1986 p 17.
5. See Thierry Kuntzel, “Video about Video,” (Videoglyphes, Paris, 1980) in Jill Forbes, (ed), INA – French for Innovation, BFI Dossier 22, 1984, p24.
6. For more on the idea of video as electronic writing see my Deleuzean inspired essay, “Video as Moonlighting” in Adrian Martin (ed), Experimenta (catalogue), Melbourne, Modern Image Makers Association Inc (MIMA), 1990. It goes without saying that Raymond Bellour’s exemplary video criticism (over the past decade or so) has been instrumental in promoting this particular view of video.
7. See Max Almy, “ Video : Electronic Collage,” in Katherine Hoffman (ed) Collage, UMI Research Press, 1989, p 362
8. For an excellent detailed look at video’s genealogy in the context on modernism in the visual arts see Katherine Dieckman, “Electra Myths: Video, Modernism and Postmodernism,” in Art Journal pp195-203. Though I don’t agree with her basic critical view of French video her incisive critique of the positivist historiography and rationale informing the Paris – based 1984 Electra show demands further extensive discussion. And for a clear suggestive examination of literary modernism and the emergence of the new technical media during early decades of this century see Hugh Kenner, The Mechanic Muse, New York/Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987.
9. Fargier’s quotation is located in Electra : Electricity and Electronics in the 20th Century Art (Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris catalogue 1984) Into : by Frank Popper.
10. The idea of Fargier’s art constitutes criticism and his criticism art emanates from similar remarks made by Patricia Kaplan and Susan Manso about Duchamp in their short introduction to Octavio Paz’s “Marcel Duchamp, Or the Castle of Purity” in Patricia Kaplan and Susan Manso (eds) major European Art Movements 1800-45 New York, E.P.Dutton, 1977, p353
11. Fargier’s quote comes from the 1988 interview with the arts (see footnote 1).
12. See Jean-Paul Fargier’, “Manner, Banner, Matter”, in Dorine Mignot (ed) Revision,     Amsterdam, Stedelijk 1987, p24.
13. See Mauree Turim, “The Cultural Logic of video” in Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (eds) illuminating Video, New York, Aperture/the Bay Area Video Coalition, 1990, pp338-339, Turim’s insightful comments on video’s unfinished modernist project as being inscribed in its very apparatus strike a sympathetic chord with Dieckman’s view of video as a “medium of suspension, bridging modernist and postmodernist conditions with a variety of pluralist features” (see footnote 8 p199).
14. Jean- Paul Fargier, “ Last Analogy Before Digital Analysis”, in Elke Town (ed) Video By Artists 2, Toronto, Art Metropole, p75.
15. Dieckman, op. cit., p196.
16. Ibid, p198. Dieckman is one of the few Anglo-American commentators on video to talk about Duchamp’s important influence on the medium.
17. See Jean-Paul Fargier’s untitled essay on Robin des Voix in Mignot, op cit, p39/
18. Robin’s quotation is located in Fargier’s Robin des Voix essay in Mignot, ibid, p37. For Pound’s view of the “mediumistic artist” a propos of the new technical media (especially radio) see Daniel Tiffany. “Phantom Transmissions: The Radio Broadcasts of Ezra Pound”, in Substance, vol 19, no 1, 1990, p61. (My thanks to Mark Jackson for referring me to Tiffany’s article).
19. Jean-Paul Fargier, “The hidden side of the moon”, in Dorine Mignot, The Luminous Image, Amsterdam, Stedelijik Museum, 1984, p43. This essay is arguably one of the most eloquent pieces written on Godard, cinema and video.
20. Ibid, p43.
21. Cf Tiffany, op cit, p62.
22. Regis Durand, “On Conversing: In/On Writing”, Substance, no27, 1980, p47.
23. Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination, Lond., Pan Books/Picador, 1981, p287.