Disrupting The Past

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DISRUPTING THE PAST: the beauty of messing with nostalgia

Gail Smith (636778) Master of Contemporary Art, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Semester One, 2019

IMAGES

Fig. 1. Hollis Frampton, (nostalgia), 1971.

Fig. 2. Hollis Frampton, (nostalgia), 1971.

Fig 3. Hollis Frampton, (nostalgia), 1971.

Fig. 4. Hollis Frampton, (nostalgia), 1971.

Fig. 5. Mark Leckey, Dream English Kid 1964-1999 AD, 2015.

Fig. 6. Mark Leckey, Dream English Kid 1964-1999 AD, 2015.

Fig. 7. Mark Leckey, Dream English Kid 1964-1999 AD, 2015.

Fig. 8. Mark Leckey, Dream English Kid 1964-1999 AD, 2015.

Fig. 9. Gail Smith, Aldbrough, 2019.

Fig. 10. Gail Smith, Aldbrough, 2019.

Fig. 11. Gail Smith, Aldbrough, 2019.

LIST OF IMAGES

Figures 1 – 4: Frampton, Hollis. (nostalgia), 1971. Accessed May 15 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voMDL1TgTh4&list=PL313CFE2D67C39FEB Figures 5 – 8: Leckey, Mark. Dream English Kid 1964-1999 AD. 2015. Accessed May 23 2019. https://vimeo.com/144790614 Figures 8 – 11: Smith, Gail. Aldbrough. 2019. Accessed June 1 2019. https://vimeo.com/339489456.

“In critical circles, nostalgia has a negative, even decadent connotation...I am told nostalgia is the intellectual’s guilty pleasure.” 1

In my Honours year at university, I had to present my work to the class cohort. My practice involves the use of archival, found images and the general consensus about the large-scale darkroom prints was that they were quite striking. Discussion of the dismissal of the digital and the embracing of the analogue was praised and I was feeling the warm glow of art world acceptance. Heads nodded as the photographs were studied further in silence.

At last someone spoke: “But really it’s just nostalgia,” she said. And with that the whole thing collapsed. Damned with faint praise. The works were not really as impressive as first thought. Thanks ‘nostalgia.’

This dismissal marked the beginning of a personal quest to divest nostalgia of its kitschy sentimentality and this essay is part of that ongoing investigative journey into how visual artists use nostalgia as an effective tool in a contemporary art practice. It will examine two film-makers, Hollis Frampton and Mark Leckey, who endeavoured to either destroy their archive, or exorcise the past and will propose that their efforts only succeeded in a disruption of personal history. Sitting alongside will be an analysis of my own work which also attempts to address the subject of reconfigured recollection and use of the archive.

1

Moyra Davey, Long Life, Cool White (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1999), 128.

HOLLIS FRAMPTON (nostalgia) 1971 What better way to begin than with a film called (nostalgia)?2 Hollis Frampton was one of the pioneers of experimental cinema in the USA, and he brought a painstaking approach to his film-making. What began as an interest and a career in photography lead to a move to film-making and he often used his original photographs as source material.3 He produced (nostalgia) from this archive which included 12 images showing, among others, his artist friends Carl Andre and Frank Stella, an anonymous newspaper photo, the interior of a darkroom, and a self-portrait.4 The film’s opening shot is an image of a photographic darkroom placed on top of what appears to be a grubby surface with slight curves at top and bottom (fig.1.) The narrator tells us this was the first photo he ever took with the “direct intention of making art.”5 He elaborates, explaining he photographed some drawings by Carl Andre and then with the last frame of the film, he took his portrait.

But where is Andre? All we can see is machinery. Something is awry here. Tendrils of smoke emerge from behind the photo and the image is soon overtaken by flames which lick from the symmetrical curves. They catch hold, curling the photo and revealing the concentric circles of a hotplate underneath (fig.2.) Of course! Destruction of the photo! But

(nostalgia), directed by Hollis Frampton (USA :1971), 36:00, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voMDL1TgTh4&list=PL313CFE2D67C39FEB 3 Frampton’s Zorns Lemma began as a series of still photographs Word Pictures (1962-63) which he later decided would be better presented as an experimental film. Eventually this 45-minute exploration of language, became the first avant-garde film to be screened at the New York Film Festival in 1970.

4 (nostalgia) would become the first short in his Hapax Legomena series of seven films produced over the following year.

5 (nostalgia) 2

something is still not quite right. The random yet beautiful nature of the flame has distracted us just slightly from the narrator’s story.

Narrator: He insisted that the photograph must incorporate a handsome small picture frame that had been given him a year or so before by a girl named North. How the metronome entered the scheme I don’t recall but it must have been deliberately.6

What? Now we are desperately scanning the photo not only to find Andre but also a picture frame and a metronome but the chemistry which holds the image firm to the paper and paper itself are well and truly alight. Too late. The film lingers until the photo is ash (fig.3.) The screen turns black and another photo is placed on the hotplate. It shows a man with his head in a picture frame holding the stalk of a metronome (fig.4.) Now we get it! The previous narration referred to this photo but there is no correction by the narrator. Time has been shifted, Frampton is talking of the past in a historical sense and also in the film before us. Words and image no longer correspond directly and we have to retain as much information as possible to relate it to the next photo. Now we know the rules we can join in but as Frederico Windhausen in his analysis of the work states, we have to: “...consider a range of issues, including the nature of temporal experience and the ways in which meaning can be ascribed to the sounds, words, and images encountered…”7 In his notes on the film, Frampton stated: “I found the photographs I chose….fairly embarrassing. So I decided to…destroy them (retaining the negatives of course……) by

(nostalgia).

Frederico Windhausen, “Words into Film: Toward a Genealogical Understanding of Hollis Frampton’s Theory and Practice,” October 109, Summer (2004): 92, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3397662 6 7

burning! My biographical film would be a document of this compassionate act!”8 Fire is far from compassionate yet through the use of his own archive and by reminiscing on the story behind each photograph, Frampton certainly evokes a romantic nostalgia. He chose to distance himself further as the author by using friend and fellow film-maker Michael Snow as the narrator yet he wrote: “In the end when I saw the film…I felt I had made an effigy…of this opaque young man’s life, even if I had not wholly entrained its sadness.”9 Frampton’s incisive use of stills as flexible images (both in a moving film and also within the footage itself as they burn and change) and the employment of narration as a malleable tool creates temporal tension and fracture. Andre’s hand halts the metronome, freezing time and placing words and pictures deliberately out of synchronicity. The photos are from the past yet we have to keep our thought processes in the future to deal with the image that is next in line. Matilde Nardelli notes that this “twist” is disorientating but as Frampton’s ‘trick’ becomes apparent this gives way to “a complex mixture of anticipation and waiting, memorisation and recollection.”10 It feels as though we are playing the child’s party game where we have to memorise random items on a tray before they are taken away one by one. It is all collage, not only in the work but also in the way our minds have to cutand-paste disparate pieces of information and flit between a dual temporality.11 Nardelli notes: “… if our mental effort to match the ‘right’ image to the ‘right’ anecdote makes us hover between future and past, then it also palpably brings to the fore the fleetingness and evanescence of time itself.”12

Hollis Frampton, "Notes on (nostalgia)," in On The Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton ed. Bruce Jenkins (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009),224.

9 Frampton, ”Notes on (nostalgia),” 224.

10 Matilde Nardelli, “Hollis Frampton: (Nostalgia),” Art Book 14, no. 1 (2007): 69, Academic OneFile.

11 Paul Sharit’s Word Movie (1966) also highlighted temporal destruction with disparate words and images. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x22vmtj, accessed May 30, 2019.

12 Nardelli, “Hollis Frampton,” 69.

8

MARK LECKEY Dream English Kid 1964-1999 AD 2015 “…I wallow in the mire of nostalgia… but I blame where I’m from. It’s not my fault.

It’s my environment.”13

Dream English Kid 1964-1999 AD, grew from a video clip Mark Leckey discovered online of a Joy Division gig he had attended in Liverpool, England in the late 70s.14 The realisation that, unbeknown to him, a particular time in his life had been captured on film and distributed across the world was the catalyst for Leckey’s ambitious bid to construct a personal memoir using only found footage. At just over 20 minutes’ duration, Dream English Kid is often shown as part of a larger installation which includes models of elements from the film, such as motorway bridges, electricity pylons and sound systems.15 Leckey’s concerns with memory and place, and the role of technology to repeatedly re-live the past through the dual lens of the banal and the interesting lead one reviewer to label him a modern-day Don Quixote. Margaret Carrigan, on seeing his 2016 MoMa show called him “a starry-eyed conquistador of late capitalist simulacra seeking the sublime in the commodities and digital ephemera of our daily lives.”16

Tate, “Mark Leckey - I Wallow in the Mire of Nostalgia,” October 2016, TateShots, 05:51, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CATey5LcEF4.

14 Dream English Kid 1964-1999 AD, directed by Mark Leckey (UK: 2015), https://vimeo.com/144790614.

15 Leckey’s On Pleasure Bent (2013) was a precursor to Dream English Kid in its use of online collage to construct an autobiography.

16 Margaret Carrigan, “Mark Leckey,” Modern Painters 29, 1 (2017): 94, Art & Architecture Complete.

13

I must admit to having a soft spot for Mark Leckey and not only because we are both from the north of England. His breakthrough work Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999)17 showcased the UK’s dance sub-culture from northern soul in the 60s and 70s through to the rave scene of the 80s and 90s. All the footage was found or sourced from documentaries and the soundtrack used samples of dancefloor tracks. As a die-hard northern soul aficionado it was astounding to see ‘my’ underground passion included in a work of contemporary art.18 But that is what Leckey does best. His meticulous and sophisticated sampling from dozens of cultural references taps into a nostalgia which on the face of it is quintessentially British and into which I too can become immersed. Take this snapshot of a visual and sonic list from Dream English Kid: •

The elusive opening chord of The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night (fig.5)19

•

A riff from ‘Groovin’ With Mr Bloe’ by Mr Bloe (number 2 on the UK pop chart, July 1970)

•

The barely audible sound of Dr Who’s Tardis;

•

An errant Frisbee flying dangerously close to a pylon (a sample from a particularly scary UK public safety information film)

•

The Radio Times, BBC tv guide and a British institution, from October 1973 (I was 14, Leckey 9)

•

Liz Fraser, ‘glamour girl’ and stalwart of the ‘Carry On’ series of films (fig.6)

•

1970s interior décor (we had wallpaper like that – and carpets too)

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, directed by Mark Leckey (UK: 1999), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS2McPYzEE. 18 Northern soul originated in the 1960s in the ballrooms of northern England where predominantly workingclass young people would dance through the night to rare soul and rhythm and blues records imported from the USA. It is characterised by energetic acrobatic dancing, “on the fours” of the music’s backbeat.

19 Debate over how the opening chord was constructed has lasted for almost 50 years, though mathematician Dr Kevin Houston declared in 2012 that he had solved the mystery. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/mathematician-cracks-beatles-mystery--perhaps-2012090925lx1.html 17

•

Joy Division performing at Eric’s - I worked in Liverpool at the time and Eric’s was one of my regular haunts (fig.7)

Given the above list, it would seem that the work is a mish-mash of all things Leckey holds dear – music, old television shows, hanging out with his mates, going to gigs, watching the football. But his approach is far more nuanced. Patrizia Dander in an interview with Leckey observed that though the work may come from a subjective point of view, “it opens up a wider cultural discourse.”20 The personal is the framework onto which everything else is built and in Dream English Kid the layer on top is the power of communication, through technology, mass media and social connections.

Take for example the opening scene. We hear a countdown, reminiscent of the early space missions. From our bird’s-eye perspective, we see Liverpool’s famous sons, the Beatles, on stage, a prime example of the power of music to communicate with the masses.

The opening chord of A Hard Day’s Night is played, the countdown continues and an early satellite is sent into Earth’s atmosphere. 21 22 All systems are go and Leckey launches us simultaneously into his young life and a 35-year snapshot of his country.

Alex Kitnick has asserted that it is Leckey’s ability to focus his memories and make them universally accessible, which is the key to his works, stating: “He uses himself as a template through which others might see themselves, larger transformations in media, our

20

Haus der Kunst, “Mark Leckey: As If,” March 2015, 06:39, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8HlSHTEtdc 21 Beatles’ producer George Martin later declared: “the strident guitar chord was the perfect launch," in Mark Lewisohn, The Beatles Recording Sessions: the official Abbey Road studio session notes 1962-1970 (New York: Harmony, 1988), 43.

22 It is never indicated but I am sure Leckey would have been aware of the Beatles’ 1967 performance of All You Need Is Love, which was broadcast to a worldwide audience, the first time an international live satellite feed had ever been attempted.

relationship with technology and so forth.”23 Gathering these sources is a ‘curating’ of sorts but Leckey has shied away from this term alleging that it implies a modicum of taste, preferring instead to label his practice as ‘aggregating.’24 As a noun, aggregate is a building material made up of variously sized fragments of rock used as a solid foundation on which to build infrastructure. I propose that Leckey uses the word as both a verb and a noun as he builds up layers of internet objects. Additionally, aggregate is often referred to as hardcore which of course Leckey used in its alternative meaning as defining the epitome of streetwise cool, in Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore.

On the surface, Dream English Kid projects a somewhat sentimental nostalgia – but it soon grabs the past by the scruff of its neck and shows darkness: an air disaster, Leckey’s time on drugs in a London squat, people walking alone in the city at night, the Y2K bug, surveillance footage overlaid with the words “London Kills Me,” urban dereliction during the UK’s economic downturn in the 70s and 80s. The film has its bleak side and Leckey has labelled it as an “exorcism.” As he worked his way through, he found episodes of his life that had had the most effect upon him stating: “They all happened to be quite dark in a way because they’re the things I am still struggling with….they still linger whereas the joyous occasions…I have to recall them in some way….these are the things you carry round with you all the time…it is definitely an anxious film and a fretful one. It is not a joyous film.”25 This anxiety also feeds into Leckey’s installations. Scenic elements from Dream English Kid are recreated as models such as Exorcise the Bridge @ Eastham Rake, a freeway

23

Alex Kitnick, “Everybody’s Autobiography,” in On Pleasure Bent, eds. Patrizia Dander and Elena Filipovic (Koln: Koenig, 2015), 211–16.

24 Elena Filipovic, “The Real Embodiment of Ersatz Things,” in On Pleasure Bent (Koln: Koenig, 2015), 34-41.

25 Tate, “Mark Leckey - I Wallow in the Mire of Nostalgia.”

bridge under which Leckey and his friends would congregate.26 Lurid yellow sodium lights, bill posters of contemporaneous advertising and newspapers, and scaled-down transmission towers enforce the simulacra and engender an experience in a world, which Leckey has asserted, is one of alienation.27 Margaret Carrigan concurs, stating Dream English Kid proves Leckey is “deeply concerned with the authenticity—or the verifiable lack thereof—of our very sense of being.”28

GAIL SMITH ALDBROUGH 2019 Frampton and Leckey were my mentors as I disrupted my own archive, via someone else’s memories. I bought Aldbrough from eBay but that was not its title.29 It had no name, no sound and no real narrative. It was just a 23-minute document of an anonymous family’s holiday travels. The raw 8mm footage was digitised then the original running order of the film was altered, cut and pasted, duplicated, reversed, slowed down and accelerated. Audio grabs, sourced online were added, as was the narration. The soundtrack includes shipping forecasts, reflecting the dangerous local deep-sea trawling industry, and audio from the illegal pirate radio stations which moored off the coast in the 60s and 70s. Royal Air Force bombers indiscriminately used the waters off Aldbrough as target practice leaving unexploded ordnance to wash in with the tide and be exposed by landslips. The narration is autobiographical, but unlike Frampton, I delivered the lines myself to tell a story. It may

Exorcise the Bridge @ Eastham Rake, directed by Mark Leckey, (UK: 2017), 07:52, https://vimeo.com/224436988 27 Haus der Kunst, “Mark Leckey: As If.” 28 Carrigan, “Mark Leckey,” 94.

29 Gail Smith, “Aldbrough,” June 2019, 06:53, https://vimeo.com/339489456 26

have started with an element of nostalgia but its conclusion encompassed greater concerns.

In the end my disrupted archive became a wider comment on the inevitable destruction of a small Yorkshire seaside town.

Frampton and Leckey were never really serious about destroying the archive or exorcising their past; it was purely an artistic provocation. Frampton admitted he kept his negatives in case he needed them in the future. Leckey searched the Internet for his ‘memories’ in the full knowledge that their existence online meant his past was readily available and forever accessible. Frampton’s (nostalgia), until the advent of YouTube and other platforms, was rarely seen but can also now be viewed 24/7, digitised and cleaned-up.

It can be paused, rewound, fast-forwarded, muted, enlarged. And of course, Dream English Kid constructed solely from the Internet can be seen in much the same way.

Frampton and Leckey did not destroy or exorcise their past but disrupted their archive and in so doing pulled nostalgia into contemporary relevance. Frampton played with constant interruption of time and narrative which was disordered even further by the knowledge that the negatives were saved. His choice of Michael Snow to deliver the lines also dislocated Frampton from his own memories. Dislocation and disruption occur in Leckey’s work too but in a slightly different context. Rather than a direct physical act (as in (nostalgia)), Leckey’s memories are constructed through the third party of a digital interface. He is a consumer in a vast library, removed from the actual physical source, a step away from the original. Layer upon layer of disparate clips construct both a simulacrum and a personal portrait of a man and a country.

“In our memory everything becomes equally valuable and significant. All points of our recollections are tied to one another. They form chains and connections in our memory which ultimately comprise the story of our life.

“To deprive ourselves of all this means to part with who we were in the past and in a certain sense, it means to cease to exist.”30

30

Ilya Kabakov, “The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away,” in The Archive, ed. Charles Merewether (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT, 2006), 32-37.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Davey, Moyra. Long Life, Cool White. Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2008.

--------------------------Filipovic, Elena. “The Real Embodiment of Ersatz Things.” In On Pleasure Bent, edited by Patrizia Dander and Elena Filipovic, 34-41. Koln: Koenig, 2015.

Frampton, Hollis. “Notes on (nostalgia).” In On The Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, edited by Bruce Jenkins. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009.

Kabakov, Ilya. “The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away.” In The Archive, edited by Charles Merewether, 32-37. London and Cambridge, Mass.: Whitechapel Gallery and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006.

Kitnick, Alex. “Everybody’s Autobiography.” In On Pleasure Bent, edited by Patrizia Dander and Elena Filipovic, 211-16. Koln: Koenig, 2015.

--------------------------Carrigan, Margaret. “Mark Leckey.” Modern Painters 29, 1 (2017): 92–96. Art and Architecture Complete.

Nardelli, Matilde. “Hollis Frampton: (Nostalgia).” Art Book, 1 (2007): 69-70. Academic OneFile.

Windhausen, Frederico. “Words into Film: Toward a Genealogical Understanding of Hollis Frampton’s Theory and Practice.” October 109 (2004): 76-95. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3397662 --------------------------(nostalgia). Directed by Hollis Frampton. USA: 1971. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voMDL1TgTh4&list=PL313CFE2D67C39FEB Dream English Kid 1964-1999 AD. Directed by Mark Leckey. UK: 2015. https://vimeo.com/144790614.

“Mark Leckey - I Wallow in the Mire of Nostalgia.” TateShots, October 2016. 05:51. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CATey5LcEF4.

“Mark Leckey: As If.” Haus der Kunst, March 2015. 06:39. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8HlSHTEtdc.

Smith, Gail. “Aldbrough.” June 2019. 06:53. https://vimeo.com/339489456.