Abigail Child

An Environmental Preface to “Ethnography’s Excess”

In the 1970s I thought the most environmentally friendly film anyone could produce would be the shortest: would use the least of the world’s resources.  Found materials were an accessible addition to this ethos.  A kind of arte povera, a reusing of materials, a recontextualization, a re-making of detritus, of that which is/was abandoned, thrown away, and thereby, a reconfiguration that challenged the sleek, the new, the commercial.

The argument then and now was one of Production…too much or the salve of Capital? With the judgement of “too much” came an adjustment: to re-use, re-purpose what was already there. The materials were available as outtakes, feature film digests, coming attractions, abandoned workprints, reels found on Canal street or in New Jersey garages. The materials included fiction and D-ranked documentaries, student experiments, internegatives, home movies: the dregs, scraps and bits of the world that had been degraded, abandoned, under-used and under-valued.

The use of found materials in art has a long history, appearing in Japanese paper collages, valentines of the l9th century, Hannah Hoch collages and up to the present with Sarah Sze’s fragile cultural accumulations: her sculptures of everyday materials such as toilet paper and metro tickets from foreign travels. Sculpture and film share this trait of reusing refuse (see Duchamp) as does writing in the works of Bern Porter, Ashbury and O’Hara (to some extent) and Flarf, among others.

The richness of refuse is what artists embrace, most often modifying through irony and vision to remake and re-encounter the world, to create another reading, another space/time out of these abandoned materials.

The question that remains might be the use value of appropriation? Or the question: what is of value, itself?  Appropriation implies taking for one’s own use, typically without the owner’s permission, or secondarily an amount of money for a specific purpose. Herein we are ‘appropriating’ [usually without permission] cultural signs in an era when we are overrun/inundated with a wealth of objects, furnishings, clothes, batteries, computers, ads, entertainment, outdated technology, connectors and apparatus, even storage units (storage units!?) to host same. How to deal with this excess?

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Asked by none other than the filmmaker and poet Jonas Mekas how I could cut up a family’s home movies for my film Covert Action (2004), I was stunned by the question. His apparent unfathomable desire to keep hidden these images in a reel in a cardboard box in a suburban garage. To my mind, and what I replied to his critique, was that I had released these images to the world, instead of their remaining in a moldering pile, literally shrinking as the celluloid and plastic retreated into slowly disintegrating molecules.

I clearly still feel this way: why pick up the used, the forgotten, the lost, in a world of new shiny iridescent toys? Why? To undo and remake a world in which we can live. To envision a world out of the lost. If indeed Europeans colonized and ‘appropriated’ the new world, expropriated slaves to that world, killing the Indigenous through virus, labor and sword—does it not behoove us to pull appropriation from the morass of history and reappropriate, reapportion history into a mix of reverberations? Not restoration but renewal, not new construction but a rhythm of meanings with which we can play and respond. To reassert the dishelved, the disordered, reorganized into a new history, into the time in which we live.

Found materials open up worlds: vocabularies, images, travel and fantasy—these images and sounds are available for replay in all their partial, fragmented, raggedy selves. Not the moment of execution repeated endlessly (the tragedy of trauma) but to untie/ disturb these patterns and rework them into a liveable semantic. Not left on the pile of refuse or garbage, but remade into an architecture/art of our time.

E T H N O G R A P H Y‘ S    E X C E S S

It is perhaps worth remembering that the impetus for collage (both 2- and 3-dimensional versions) is from technology and from mass communications, beginning with newspapers from the 19th century on, with their adjacent pages and columns, allocating space to the time of the commuter’s passage to work, to her or his “read”. Thus, work outside the house and printed news—i.e. new forms of labor and information under industrialization with its ability to swiftly reach people across space— combine to underlie what we might call a collage culture.

I grew up within that culture: of the picture magazines, LIFE, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, the articles switching from country to country, face to face, colonialism to cereal to physics to war. I grew up as well with television, the prodigal exemplar of switching, tuning, changing, channeling content and advertisement. Given this world, and indeed the global world of the internet, of course we glean, we scan, we scavenge, we collage.

I have always been interested in excess, what doesn’t come clean. Not the perfect image, but the messy one, the left over, the inordinate, the extraordinary, the scrappy. Not the monumental unity, but the pieced. Not random, but maximal and inclusionary.

“…. What shape does an engaged politics assume in an empire of signs?”[1] 

Fragmentation of the image-object invades and evades, the human body is spun and punned across the page. Melodrama relies on intensity and mystery, takes on Sisyphean humor while patterns emerge: of wheels, faces, conundrums, colors. The connections shape a medley of relations, the images acting as free radicals, reaching rhizomatically into the life of other image-objects to build another, impossible? world, a soft architecture of the imagination. Where eyes pass through thresholds to new doors, nuns’ habits become stars in an alternate sky, Arab men feast before a garden in front of a prison. The layers of meeting and meaning proliferate: magnetic, recognizable estranged, communal.

Simultaneously influenced by and eliciting the surrealist Americanism of a Bruce Conner, the cut-and-paste gestures of Hannah Hoch and the sensuousness of color and intensity of the abstract expressionists, these collages are alive to the makeup of the social body. None of these works are works of nostalgia— neither for the 1950s nor family. They are not send-up’s, nor satires of famous Hollywood features, nor adoration of mythic heroines, nor mourning for the dead. These are image worlds built out of refuse, out of the tossed, marginal and kitschy, jumbled, upside down, topsy turvy, gleanings from the mainstream, savings, salvage.

I give myself “obstructions.” This collage will only be made out of triangles, this one structured by color, another only of complete objects or products. In the process I begin to understand the overall figuration of paintings by Bosch, the limits of the page and influence of size, how the process parallels my filmmaking: that moment when every piece ‘suits’—and the next, where it all falls apart.  The attempt:  to structure the mind’s heap of image-eyes—to re-play/reread/re-arrange the industrial/capitalistic landscape of images flowing to us via the net, social media and media in general. To create amidst the swiftly changing accelerating welter of beauty and information in the contemporary. Not to return to landscape, not to sexual exploitation, but to swim in and twist, “bust” the flow.   

The era’s modern and now postmodern, post-internet citizens of the 21st century have exhibited a previously unimaginable capacity to cope with the discontinuous, in aesthetics and in our physical as well as virtual life. We live in a world cluttered with things, so it is a necessity to go behind them, under and around them, to locate sources, transmutations, asymptotes—to re-contextualize and upset the images’ usual associations, to underline hidden meanings, refresh their vitalities and, perhaps, their irresolution.

Questions remain: has digital simply increased the ephemerality of our collective images, even as it has widened the availability and use of same in art and in the commercial spheres? Are we living in too much—too much, to quote the artist Thomas Hirschhorn? Are we connecting everything, because we sense that we are lost, we are frightfully disconnected in the first place?[2] Or as Vilém Flusser suggests—is it that:

Human beings forget they created the images in order to orientate themselves in the world. Since they are no longer able to decode them, their lives become a function of their own images: imagination has turned into hallucination. [3]

Yet for artists who live in the saving/savaging that art-making is—we continue to refigure, and refuse, excavating objects and emotions, remaking relations to confabulate a future—transmuting hallucination (back?) into/and through imagination reshaping our visualized world into a constitutive and comic realization.

NOTES

[1] Mark Dery. Open Magazine pamphlet, Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the empire of the Signs, 1993

[2] Josee Belisle, Thomas Hirshhorn:Jumbo Spoons and big Cake, page 32

[3] Vilém Flusser Towards A Philosophy of Photography on web at: ms.com/excap/readings/flusser-towards-a-philosophy-of-photography.pdf