David Claerbout is a Belgian artist who works with both photography and video, I am especially interested in the way which his work confronts the boundary between photography and video. He does this by exploiting cinematic projects of photographs, as well as photographic presentations of cinema, such as large format grids of video, used to moving narratives. He also presents his work in a large format, as projections in a white space, he wishes to make the museum experience different to that of the cinema.
Claerbout realises that the language of his work is cinematic, but feels the museum or gallery space is a way to represent this, giving the audience more freedom to move through his work, making it more personal and less controlled than sitting in a cinema. He tries to move away from the cinema experience by new ways of installing work. Firstly his work is installed in a white rather than dark black space, secondly it is projected onto walls rather than a screen and thirdly, more than one piece can be viewed at once. This makes the experience much different to watching a film. Another interesting technique is the use of transparent screens – this makes the work partly visible, but also fall off into the space, hitting the walls and people moving through the gallery, making the whole space become part of the work, rather than just the projections.
Claerbout also presents still image as a projcetion, blurring the line between the two formats, the photograph allows the viewer time to contemplate the image, while video progresses in a linear fashion, however, when the line is blurred like this can we define which catergory the work is truly in? Another way in which this is challenged is through the use of short, looped material, which can be defined as neither a still image, nor a cinematic film – which relys on narrative.
Damian Sutton discusses Claerbouts work, his analysis shows how an image can collapse time, as well as how the different medias can work together as described by the intermediality lecure I studied earlier, and how new technologies allow this more readily;
In Claerbout’s video overlays, the “superimposed time codes”
emphasize the gap that we appreciate between past and future, but it
takes Claerbout rending them apart to reveal how photography naturally
crashes past and future together. New technologies always have
the capacity to reveal the unspoken characteristics of old ones.
The Crystal Image of Time (p225)