newsfrom...: April 2015

The centre of interest in images is confined to a limited area. To a particular position in the body where the contemporary conditions of living reign. All that was lived directly by the author while moving away into a representation of a partially deployed reality. The author, being a filmmaker, a photographer, or a writer, for instance, brings into focus particular aspects that he/she has detached from life resulting in presenting a singular perspective, given through a narrative. This is a general, unifying narrative, built around an individual condition, where all information is re-established and is presented, reflecting the subjective perception of his/her own reality, a kind of confined contamination. Considered partially, the unity of the narrative corresponds to the omniscient of zero focalisation taken from the author’s viewpoint.

Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009), in The Savage Mind (1962/1966) has called to this process of constructing realities bricolage – the assemblage or creation of an oeuvre from a diverse range of available things gathered together in order to solve new problems, i.e. an interpretation. No simple rule is the object of contemplation in itself, but, instead, it is only when elements are added that a frame is formed over the main subject. The transition between different focalisations of images of the world finds itself fulfilled in the world of the specific relationships between images that are made autonomous. Where a representation is added to another representation. A “concrete inversion of life,” as is expressed by Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle (1994). This movement, often surrounded by other materials supplied by life’s modes of production and exchange, frame the reception of an oeuvre and, consequently, its interpretation by the public. Presenting it, in itself, as irregular, often, denoting alterations or modifications of pre-existing elements. The narrative is, thus, that which concentrates all looking and all consciousness.

The filmmaker, Pedro Costa (b. 1959) in Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth, 2006), as in some of his other movies, uses non-actors to perform as themselves within a cinematographic context. This is just as in Jean Rouch’s shared anthropology, in which the filmmaker, by way of his practice, blurs the line, between fiction and documentary; the portrayed characters playing their own roles as a constituent part of a particular social background. An ethnofiction, developed in the area of visual anthropology, in which Rouch shifts the “locus of power by giving voice to those who had been disempowered by colonialism, and with the implications of colonial rule.”[i] Within it, the author (the filmmaker, the photographer, the writer) is accepted as an interfering part of the narrative. What Colossal Youth’s characters are telling us is their personal stories, a “fake signifier of authenticity” as James Quandt has expressed. Their role is to be in life as it is a work of art. To share a narrative! The story of “poor, forlorn lives in the suburban slums of Lisbon,” people who are being relocated to a decent low-cost housing project on the outskirts of the capital. Nonetheless, life has many meanings. The contact and encounter between real life and fiction happens in the convergence of the becoming.

There is always more than one story being told; there is always more than one aesthetic available to us. What we have in an image that accompanies a narrative is a multiplicity of perspectives, even if we consider only the artist as being the author of the artwork, the image as the artwork and, on the other side, the audience for the artwork. Through stories “people construct identities (however multiple and changing) by locating themselves or being located within a repertoire of emplotted[ii] stories.”[iii] If it is the becoming that Pedro Costa is looking to expand upon through his aesthetics of images, the same happens with Marisa J. Futernick’s If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses (2014). However, both Costa and Futernick (b. 1980), on two different levels, through their works, Colossal Youth (2006) and If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses (2014), respectively, expurgates society’s inner workings, which are ultimately put in place to protect this same society. Whilst one is about “still lives” the other is on ‘’life stills”; meaning, whereas both aim to create through their work a slowing in the rate of change so diversion can be perceived, the difference between them is in that while Costa uses cinema’s practise to expand on duration through movement (or the lack of it) – Youth as a kind measure – Futernick, instead, uses photography’s concept of moment to mark frequency in a narrative that has, as a focus, the becoming obsolete, out of date, vestigial – another kind of measure. Truth is to be found in location, in the embodiment of local real life, and in the contingently idea with no basis in reality by both.

The diversity of the need have an effect on the way that the narrative’s structures affect our perception. Understood in its totality, the narrative voiced by the author is both the result and the project of both the theory and study about contemporary society, and the structure and the way that those affect our perception. The work of Marisa J. Futernick, If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses, concerns not only the distinction between what comes out from the subjective and what is from the objective focalisation engaged by the photographer, but, as well as the various gradations between them, and, furthermore, an agency for the unrealism of reality – one reality becomes disused, discarded or antiquated while it is being replaced by another reality contrived by the use of what the technological changes have made available. As in the same way did Costa earlier with his movies. “This is a move for the future,” says an estate agent Ventura, in Colossal Youth, while showing a new home and describing the neighbourhood on the outskirts of Lisbon to where he could move. In all its particular forms, the work by Futernick informs on those elements (mentioned previously) that constitute the present, those models of socially correlation and correspondence used to analyse the prevailing structure rather than to induce on an interpretation.

Man’s increasing production of images detailing his world, so he becomes more involved with life, separates him even further from that to which he means to connect to. The accumulation of delusive projected considerations dispossesses us from life’s time and space, from its physical interlocked dynamics. This detachment from life, however, reinforces our need for ostensible images that appear to be true, but that are only an illusion. We are giving to understand that the real is being concealed under those same reproductions of representations of what the real is. A mode of being that is made on contradictions, while we are protected by that white, silver, or black surface on which life is displayed. We are so used to seeing reality through prints and screens and at the safe distance of an armchair in the living room of our houses that, with this work, it isn’t Futernick that passes by while driving her car through the roads and streets of ordinary America; it is, instead, life that passes at a certain speed while the photographer is seated in her car looking out, looking through, focusing on and capturing that moment when the real passes by her. The subject repetition is oblige and necessary, since the detachment from being implies it as generalisations tend to do.

Although the perspective through which the narrative is presented can transport and confine us to several different areas: Futernick’s personal condition; the illusion brought about by the American dream; the global financial crash of 2007-2008; photography’s contested territories; be related with the significance of perception and interpretation; or, even, to the conditions denoting authenticity and manipulation. What does provides, however, an internal focus for the narrative, where all information is presented, is the dynamic act of bringing into focus – it is what does handles general subjective perceptions, of determinate characters, and the various gradations existing between them. The aesthetic narrative are, the photos taken as Futernick drove through the roads and streets of the USA’s urbanised neighbourhoods. I’m talking here about the green lawns leading us in to colourful inhabited houses; or, for that matter, empty dwellings found on the selling market: streets ordered by communication agents, a frequency of signs and structures distributed over particular spaces, nature’s intromission in to the captured environment, like reflections and refractions on the car windows. But, also, what a golden line going through green leaves in a landscape means for a person from Latin America; or, what the mountain, on the background, to someone from Japan; or, even, the word “landscape” found in a literary text to each of us individually.

The various components involved evolve collectively by vision, and by visual associations. While the use of the automobile aims to both refer to and destroy the old aesthetic narrative, while positioning the representation of those being represented as its main start; the main subject that is being offered, by the photographer, is an objective focalisation – where anything can happen at any moment. Aesthetic narrative destroys and brings uncertainty – which is a familiar evil place that is often surrounded by other subject matters. Bordering gradations that are supplied to a certain degree by an encompassing cultural landscape. These added elements form a frame for the narrative brought about by Futernick, and can change the reception and its interpretation by us, the viewers, on the whole. it is an aesthetic narrative immediately falsified by its succession. Thus, the détournement in the act is revealed by a decrease in the rate of change, a decrease in the used velocity (physics). An act of decelerating, so life can be captured on camera! We have decelerated on the very trace of movements established by the present, a slowing down recuperated by the establishment of prostheses to compensate our own physical retardation. The meaning of images has to participate in the slowing down.

The act of decelerating, conveyed by the photographer, is a decrease in the rate of change. It is at the heart of the present, or contemporary life, in all its particular forms. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices already taken by the author, playing as an agent that retards, delays, or hinders the consummation of the real. Both in Colossal Youth and in If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses fall behind and form, in themselves, part of the unity of the world, in the social praxis that has split into reality and into image. The photographer’s behaviour has a dependence on her relative motion, as observer, in relation to the speed of the observed objects. Her autonomous retarded practice sets up a real totality containing that which is her point of making.

Bibliography:
Debord, G. (1994) The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books
Quandt, J. (2006) ‘Still lives: James Quandt on the films of Pedro Costa’, Artforum International, Vol. 45, N.1, September 2006.
Rogoff, I. (2006) ‘Irit Rogoff: What is a Theorist?’, in Kein.org [http://www.kein.org/node/62]. Accessed February 26th, 2013.

Published at VASA Project: Where Do We Go Now! Marisa J. Futernick

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[i] Pink, S. (2008) ‘Analysing Visual Experience’, in Pickering, M. (ed.) Research Methods for Cultural Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd. pp. 125-49.
[ii] Brown, R. (2003) ‘The Emplotted Self: Self-Deception and Self-Knowledge’, Philosophical Paper 32 (3), 279-300.
[iii] Somers, M. R. and Gibson, G. D. (1994) ‘Reclaiming the Epistemological “Other”: Narrative and the Social Constitutions of Identity’, in Calhoun, C. (ed.), Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.