#26 - all the wars we have ever fought, ever

Title

I woke up one morning with the phrase 'all the wars we have ever fought, ever' in my head. I turned it over, had a look at it, underneath it, all around it and thought that it was not something that I could possibly begin to address. So I began to think about how it might have got there from the work that I was doing and what it actually meant as a phrase, in terms of the words, the attitude, the phrasing and the scale of it.

The way that the phrase was constructed in a childish way, like a schoolboy sulking, like a child saying, "I hate you, I'm never ever going to be your friend again, ever!" This in itself interested me as if it was a schoolyard squabble. It made me think of telling stories, telling tales. And in looking at a phrase such as this one I became aware that perhaps it only meant that to me. I had recently read an article about the recurring wars between Lebanon and Israel called something like ‘do I see or do I remember?’. When I thought about the title the word that really jumped out of this sentence was ‘I’.

Narrative

This made me think about the consideration I had given to narrative as a way of making sense of time. I thought that perhaps narrative is a way of making sense of being human and that time is one aspect of that, a way of ordering that gives us a history, a present identity and a future. It brings us structure and a way of coping.

Perception

I began to think of my work as just a series of images that could be seen or remembered or perhaps just forgotten when seen against all the wars we have ever fought.  In the end, it is what it is, the work has my intention and it has the viewers’ interaction and they may never meet, a risk all artists take and one for which an artist must be responsible. We interact with pictures, we attach meaning to them, absorb them and they become part of us.  We make connections, and they become part of us in the way that so many of the visual things we encounter are added into the sum total of ourselves. We also read, interpret, examine and manage them. But in reducing them to a series of images I became aware of the difficulty of looking at them as just images. I wanted to film ordinary things but after a while had to begin to ask whether such a thing can be done?

During the process of making the work I realised that these images actually do carry a narrative, that being my life over the past six months. It has become a very autobiographical piece, albeit unintentionally. This is in essence the point, the viewer can begin to think that this is my story which it might be, but there are still questions, where is it? Is it my house? Is it my dog? Who are the people talking? Do I work in that building? All of these questions exist and the answer is yes or no depending on how you wish to interpret, interact and pull together the images presented to you. The way that you receive the images depends on who you are and where and when you receive them, they then become part of the way that you receive the next series of images that you look at and so on and it is in this way that I wanted to address the issue of wars or not wars. All based on the narratives that form our identities. Over time the work seemed to move away from that and at the same time was always anchored by that thought, that we could stand in the same place and hear the same person say the same thing and two people can walk away with totally different interpretations.

I wanted to do something about the idea of the enormity of the idea of wars, I did not want to make a piece of work about war, I did not feel capable of doing that in a way that would not be trite or flippant so I decided that the only way I could deal with it was in the same way that I have been making work up until this point.

I looked for the connection between what I was doing and this idea of war, and over time began to become aware of the possibility of narrative being at the root of conflict, whether it be on a small scale of a misunderstanding with a friend or lover, or on the grander scale of a full-blown military conflict. Narrative difference being the issue. The race for power, is a human cycle set on repeat, from power over our own lives to power over the lives of others. I began to think in cycles, rhythm, measurement and processes where much of my work begins. 

Process

Initially the work was a series of images that would loop, round, full screen but it became clear that in themselves they had nothing to anchor them. The idea that connections might be made did not seem to be working.  There was no reason for watching, the randomness – although resulting from process and therefore not random – appeared too random with nothing to keep the viewer interested. Plus the sense of time became little more than a sense of weariness when subjected to flashing images for too long.

The addition of the second image in some way makes sense of the fast changing images, it makes the viewer more aware of them as a passing sequence. Even though this sequence is in some senses pointless and does not matter as such to the viewer, i.e. their understanding of it does not matter, their awareness of it does not matter. I was thinking about the way that film uses establishing shots, and each of these is perhaps an establishing shot, sometimes still, sometimes, panning, tracking, or completely lost through movement, in the end they do not establish anything except themselves as part of a series of shots. Ultimately this is an experiential work.

The work is made through the implementation of a process and so may be seen as structuralist but the process is not in itself the reason for the work. The process is as follows, there are 60 one minute films one the right hand side they are shown in their full 1 minute, on the left they are edited into 1 second cuts, which slide round the minute i.e. the first minute is shots 1-60, the second minute is 2-60, 1, the third minute is 3-60, 1-2 etc. The time structure is one that we recognise as the one we use to structure our day and feels natural when being viewed.

Intention

What I am attempting to do is create a situation where the lack of narrative gets the viewer to return to a position where they give up trying to make sense of a narrative that comes and goes and refers to itself at different points across the projection creating a sense of time that cannot be followed or understood. In essence to work through layers of possible interpretations until we can see images as images and see ourselves as being in the process of seeing images. Deleuze says that narrative is not inherent in images but is a result of the images. It is a result of our interaction with images, our efforts to make sense of them and the structure of the images and their sequence.

The work also attempts to deal with Deleuze's idea of the crystal image, where time folds back on itself and the actual and the virtual come together in one image, where they can be mistaken by the viewer. It is my contention in my thesis that this is better arrived at within the context of a temporal installation, which I define as a work that changes over time and is within a space that is solely for that work. In combining the idea of the irrational interval (through both the edits and the space between the images) I am trying to get beyond access to time as Deleuze would have it and by involving the idea of a false narrative creating access to our own sense of time, which is the only true time because without a viewer / participant to sense time, it does not exist.