Piercing Brightness as an Exploration of the An-archic Imaginary (in conversation with Mark Bartlett)

Abstract

Over the summer of 2011, Shezad Dawood went into production on his first feature film: Piercing Brightness, in Preston, Lancashire, in the North-West of England, after two years of research in the city, and in wider networks and archives suggested by this initial research. Interested in any case in the interplay between existing and self-created archives, for the artist the project became a way to explore the hybrid and allegorical potential of overlapping different film and video formats and different sets of meanings. As an additional layer, and based on Dawood’s interest in how artist’s film was and might be read between cinema and gallery, Dawood also made two additional ‘cuts’ of Piercing Brightness: Trailer, a 15-minute version for gallery installation (that plays with the semantics of cinema, yet altering and transferring them to the gallery), and a special 40-minute version, only to be performed with a live score by Acid Mothers Temple, or Alexander Tucker’s Decompressed Orchestra (playing with Dawood’s interest in both expanded cinema and improvised music).

These approaches are further interrogated and discussed in the following dialogue between Dawood, and academic and art/film historian Mark Bartlett, who became a regular interlocutor of Dawood’s in the lead-up to and over the course of the production. Their ongoing conversation looks at the concept of an an-archive, in relation to Foucault’s citation of Borges: ‘alter-taxonomy’ in relation to the overarching schemata of Piercing Brightness, presented here as a series of image grids.

Keywords

archive construction of meaning expanded cinema hybridity taxonomy

Mark Bartlett (MB): Archives are mostly specialised, meaning that they are devoted to one topic, author, subject and the like. They are in some way branded by specialisms or authorship. For example, I have a close artist friend, Mark Thompson, whose artwork has focused on working with live honey bees. Not unlike you, he is, in the best sense of the term, an obsessive. Not only did he become a beekeeper, a hive archivist, but he has become an apiary expert in scientific terms, and has by now collected one of the world’s most complete libraries on bee history, science, and general lore. His archive is generated by the principle of completion and wholeness of the literature on a single subject. Your archival work is driven by, as we’ve discussed before, your synthesist imaginary. In comparison to Thompson’s archival obsession, you seem to operate quite differently. Am I correct in saying that your ‘archive’ is an-archic in the sense that, perhaps like Foucault’s citation of Borges’ alter-taxonomy, you want to shake down the conventions of archivalism in order to reveal equally cogent alliances in the interstices of canonised archives? If so, when, then, or how, does your rethreading of connective neurons become an archive, and not simply a ‘collection’?

Shezad Dawood (SD): If we are to see archives in their traditional sense as devoted to a single topic, or field, for the construction of meaning, then I am interested in the intersections and mapping that might take place across archive ‘positions’. Rather like in comparative religion or literature, the consideration of one body of knowledge in light of another might be suggested to shed additional and reciprocal light, creating a new space of understanding, or gnosis. And perhaps in this way one might move from a fragmented consciousness to a more composite one, that in turn reflects the world more accurately through poetry, or poetically.

If traditional archives could be said to equate fixed bodies of knowledge, an intuitive or poetic activation of these fixed bodies of knowledge starts to open up the possibility of generating new knowledge. Rather than proposing a major leap, what I am suggesting is something more akin to cross-referencing methodologies in order to arrive at a more rigorous, comparative process, and necessarily a hybridised one.

For example, in the analysis of place that informed the research and text for my recent series of film projects in Preston, Lancashire (that exist under the umbrella title of Piercing Brightness), although I was interested in the historical photographic archive of the city (held by the Harris Museum & Art Gallery), that came much later. I was in the first instance drawn to Preston’s rich textile history, and in particular a set of historic fabric samples called ‘The Textile Manufactures of India’. Given to Preston in 1866, and containing over 700 fabrics, the 18-volume set acts as an archive of textile production in 19th-century India, but, perhaps more importantly, as a lexicon for cultural appropriation and assimilation of Indian patterns into the mills of the north of England. This act of appropriation and transformation into local production is what I am interested in: not just what an archive professes to be, but what it also reveals about the imperatives, historical or otherwise, that informed its creation.

Equally my interest in the level of UFO sightings in the wider county of Lancashire led to time spent with UFO groups and enthusiasts and attendance at specific conferences, which in turn led me to Michael Hesemann in Germany, who holds one of the world’s most authoritative archives of UFO sighting footage. For me, attempting to relate these two archives related to ‘travel’ and belief in a certain paradigm, whether the historical imperative of Empire or the cataloguing of speculative phenomena – both essentially ephemeral – was a curious process, but one that started to bear fruit in terms of trying to reveal something of the hidden layers of ‘place’ across different times, and hypothetical encounters.

In an unexpected parallel, the UFO archive, which contains material roughly from the 1950s to the present day, also doubles as an archive of hand-held film and video media, containing everything from 8mm film to Hi8 and even HD formats. Which in turn fed back into the patina of the final film I made. So yes, I would subscribe to the notion of an an-archive, rather than a collection. Not that the syntax is that important to me, but I feel a collection is a looser grouping, and what I am trying to do is to activate certain archives in relation to each other, to try to provide a fresh way of looking, not just at place, but at the alternate geographies that emerge from any reading of place.

MB: As a way to begin to prise open the network of the several convergent–divergent threads you’ve just introduced, and because your synthetic imaginary, as you say, is a ‘poetic’ one, would you say that your principle of delineating the field of your archive, and of selecting its ‘elements’, derives more from ‘poesis’ than ‘aesthesis’? Your archive is constructed, and not simply acquired or predetermined. Similarly, your imaginary is not grounded in ‘aesthetics’ or in the organic, compositional strategies so ingrained in modernist and postmodernist romantic pastiche. They, it seems to me, are both forms of the bankrupt cult of, dare I suggest, individualism, and its concomitant form of the art market’s devotion to the signature. What I’m trying to get at is that ‘aesthetics’ is not aisthesis, just as poetics is not poesis and though I’m tempted to equate your ‘synthesis’ with ‘poeisis’, and your ‘imaginary’ with aisthesis, that would only land us back in the same old problems of traditional ‘aesthetic judgment’, wouldn’t it? Thus, your ‘imaginary’ is neither ‘aesthetic’ nor ‘poetic,’ but an artistic/epistemology meant to defy that schism?

SD: I think the term ‘hybrid’ is often used in a multitude of ways that don’t incarnate its full potential as both a methodology and a way of inhabiting the world(s). It’s interesting that the well-worn science-fiction trope of multiple parallel universes is a very precise illustration of a key principle in quantum mechanics. And I guess what I am building towards is the utopian proposition that if we slag off the problematic ‘individualism’ as you term it, of late capitalism, would it be possible to see late capitalism as an incubation phase in humanity’s development? That the butterfly embodies a proposition so far beyond the humble caterpillar, that in relation to it, it could be called a multidimensional being?

What if the call to arms you are proposing is a movement from narrow subject positions to bridging the ‘schism’ of either aesthesis or poesis (which I’m not sure if you can entirely separate, especially if dealing in metaphor, which is a hybrid form par excellence)? Or, perhaps more urgently, bridging the self-limiting belief in atomised fields of knowledge as fields generally border and overlap already. So perhaps that is what I would propose as an art archive or an-archive … one that starts to see the poetics in how different collections, or systems of knowledge, image or archetype begin to speak to each other in a lively and well-considered way. I am thinking of this in terms of both the eclectic archive, and someone like John Latham, who bridged science, art and philosophy through his ‘Flat Time Theory’ (which saw the entropy generated by the fragmentation of bodies of knowledge as fundamentally detrimental to the functioning of society), and the adoption of the term ‘an-archive’ by many open-source software designers and sharers, as well as proposing an alternative cosmology of related and unified understanding of various bodies of knowledge in relation to each other, and the increased understanding that is generated as a result.

In relation to Piercing Brightness, there are a series of metaphors, which connected as such (in series), start to generate assonance and consonance (I tend to think musically about the process of editing). For example, the various 16mm studies of Muntjac deer are based on my interest in them being so generic as to appear indigenous. They actually originate from South East Asia and are one of the most ancient species of deer on the planet. They were only brought to England in 1900, to decorate the grounds of Woburn Abbey, the Duke of Bedford’s estate.

Then there are my various studies of exotic birds, which in relation to the pigeons (and their skeletons) appearing at various junctures throughout the film, actually privilege the exotic, or foreign, over the scrappy hybrids that the pigeons represent – while bemoaning the fate of the hooded alien–human hybrids that they represent, as being ultimately without place. The Muntjac and the various bird species are then put into relation with imagery from Michael Hesemann’s archive of UFO sighting material. Which places all these various genera – deer, birds and flying saucers – as visitors, or migrants, while at the same time questioning the veracity of both the images, their source archives (in terms of who authored their selection), and how they work in counterpoint to one another, in order to pull the viewer in two or more directions at once. Which brings us back again to metaphor in its truest sense: as a type of analogy closely related to other rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via association, comparison or resemblance.

MB: But I wonder if your emphasis on rhetorical figures and their effects doesn’t undercut one of the most powerful aesthetic/poetic strategies of Piercing Brightness, and your work generally. Language has been a long-standing obsession of western philosophy, and arguably the dominant paradigm of and for epistemology since Plato. Theory, since Saussure’s foundational work, in almost every field – from anthropology to film studies – has been so thoroughly prescribed by it that I think it’s necessary to use the term ‘semiocentrism’, a type of epistemological ethnocentrism. This is why Foucault’s work is so important to understanding the concept of the archive. He used the terms ‘visibilities’ and ‘prolixities’ (or statements) for the main categorical elements that constitute all archives, and equally apply to all an-archives. It’s still not well understood just how much epistemological importance he gave to the visual, and how much his work aimed to limit the hegemony of semiocentrism. This is why Deleuze described Foucault’s conception of the archive as specifically an audiovisual one, co-constituted by the parity of the linguistic and the visual. So, in addition to the linguistic forms of metaphorical association, comparison, and resemblance, shouldn’t we also talk about the visual relations between the Muntjac, birds and UFOs completely independently of language?

Would you agree with Foucault that:

Observation is logic at the level of perceptual contents; and the art of observing seems to be a logic for those meanings which, more particularly, teach their operations and usages. In a word, it is the art of being in relation with relevant circumstances, of receiving impressions from objects as they are offered to us, and of deriving inductions from them that are their correct consequences. Logic is the basis of the art of observing, but this art might be regarded as one of the parts of logic whose object is more dependent on meanings. [Foucault, (1994 [1966]: 108)

SD: I have always liked and appreciated Foucault’s struggle to get to grip with this interplay between various dichotomies, whether visibilities and prolixities, or observation and meanings. What I most appreciate is his understanding of the need to resist resolving the question, and the need to keep it in play – whatever the precise syntax. Equally I’m not sure how we would talk about the visual relations between my various images independently of language, save by merely observing them – which to my mind would undermine what we are doing here. And perhaps this is the operative space of poetics as existing in an active and shifting interplay between the visceral and the discursive. The visceral, which for me is that space of observation, intuition, incorporation and expression that engenders leaps in my process, that I then begin to talk about with friends and interlocutors like yourself (which is the discursive). I like the archive as well as I like any fiction, maybe that’s the secret pleasure I get in being a maker, and then having the added benefit of getting to talk about it.

To go back to your earlier question, that need for community I think becomes ever more important at this moment. Individualism is looking rather tired, and the individualised gesture, ‘free’ from the corruption of interlocutors, is a poor man’s product, artificially set apart from a wider sea of sharing and interaction. The interplay of different formats, mediums and histories is a rich playing field in which archives are being generated endlessly, so perhaps the visceral is always one step ahead of the discursive? And yet the discursive is needed, I would say; more as a method of transcribing of the ephemeral, than the more commonplace idea of the need to proscribe frameworks and context. And of course the visual is already a text, even if one is evolving an ‘an-archive’ as one goes, it is always grounded in sets of codes (from multiple contexts) if not particular codes (from a more semiocentric position), and so a certain rhetorical awareness is required to try and push the juxtaposition of images in new directions, and to create new or revealed meanings. And maybe this is the link between the visceral and theological? But to go back to the beginning of my response, I think it is best to avoid a categorical answer: the tension between observation and meaning for me is the fault-line for poeisis. And perhaps as Deleuze says of Foucault’s conception of the archive, this fault-line, at least in the present moment, is an audio-visual one. Which I think bears a nice relationship with the construction of perceptual fields in the passage from book to film of a number of Philip K Dick novels, not least the Richard Linklater ‘translation’ of A Scanner Darkly (2006). Adaptation is as much an act of translation, as migration, where for me hybridisation becomes the fictionalisation of oneself (in the person of the individual migrant), or of narrative (the movement of a work of fiction from idea to object), and then to another ‘author’s’ interpretation in audio-visual form. What interests me particularly about the Linklater adaptation of Dick is that the hinge of animation (the technical tour-de-force that it represents) is such a specific, and yet oddball vision of the shifting states of awareness and paranoia that encapsulate the original novel. In some ways it is the most faithful Dick adaptation, and yet the most radical translation (whereby the assertion of the director/translator/author’s rights to be named author in turn are most in evidence). In my case I was heavily influenced in the early stages of development of Piercing Brightness by the Canopus in Argos series of novels by Doris Lessing. This prefigures three galactic empires, each for their own reasons observing and manipulating the development of humanity over millennia. And given the time in which it was written, it both critiques and becomes an apology for colonialism, while imagining a future in which China is the dominant world power. While moving away from the grand scale of this ‘space opera’ to something more low-key and playful (in the use of the city of Preston as the epicentre), I still hinted at a broader scope in Piercing Brightness, which might cause us to think differently about issues such as migration, belonging, time and memory. So is Doris Lessing’s set of novels another archive from which I am drawing? Just because they are works of fiction (or announce themselves as such), does this discount them from being viewed as an archive? With many of the archives I have looked at and spent time researching, you quickly realize that they are usually archives of more than one thing, and that they are intensely subjective, which always calls to mind the layers necessary for good fiction.

MB: While I agree that visual relations are very difficult to represent in language, I think it’s possible to ‘point’ to them independently of the various schools of semiotic structuralism. Bakhtin’s work for example is a superb model for that. When I think about both the visual strategies and the temporal structure of Piercing Brightness, the mix of different generations of video technologies, still photographic images, with digital media, etc. and the way you’ve woven narrative threads with reversed time sequences, the chronotopic cutup of Preston and narrative continuity, I think of Bakhtin’s highly productive terms ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘reaccentuation’. Not only in your use of several languages, or aural responses in Arabic to a Chinese interlocutor, but also the genre hybridity. But perhaps the better analogue is Professor Canterel in Raymond Roussel’s novel, Locus Solus, a decidedly science fictional character. I’m thinking of Canterel’s extraordinary sculptural invention that Roussel called the ‘punner’, an elaborate, solar and wind-powered machine devised to sow teeth in the form of a mosaic that illustrates a Scandinavian morality tale. Roussel describes it as ‘a device capable of creating a work of aesthetic merit solely due to the combined efforts of the sun and wind’, by which he means, through the combined forces of determinism (the sun), and indeterminism (the wind). Isn’t this strange, science fictional machine an analogue of your film? Would you say that it’s a paradigm of both your own archaeological and genealogical processes? Don’t you mine science fiction archives or Sufism in order to both uncover lost or forgotten or misunderstood traditions and simultaneously reaccentuate them through translation or migration, as you’ve described your artistic practice, in ways as radically dichotomous as Canterel’s punner? And in what way are the revelations of such unhinged associations specifically theological? Would you describe yourself as a Dickian, science fictional Sufi?

SD: Haha, a Dickian science fictional Sufi? I guess that’s as good as any of a variety of possible analogues. And precisely what interests me in the use of hybridity, both philosophically and formally (in terms of the precise use of various formats, and archival or even theological structures), is not so much the specificity of the elements, but the fact that they point to a myriad of possible divergent analogues. Like your Dickian science fictional Sufi, we are free to concoct our own spiralling variants. I like the comparison to Canterel’s punner as I’ve always liked this idea of a process generator, and perhaps one that’s somewhat less of a memento mori than the ‘Invention of Morel’. Although Adolfo Bioy Casares’ early science fiction novel does play with memory and time in a similar way to my use of temporal dislocation and multiple subjectivity in Piercing Brightness. In a further parallel, Bakhtin’s terms ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘reaccentuation’ could be very useful in thinking of my approach to the structure of Piercing Brightness. I think there’s something in the shifts in language, time and protagonists that work together to fragment conventional linear structure. Memory and experience, in and of themselves, are far more of a fragmented and plural terrain than conventional (read commercial) cinematic structure would have us believe. Indeed, something of the pathology of our times is reflected in the narrowing conventions of contemporary commercial cinema. What indeed do we lose by always trying to pack our consciousness into a ‘neat’ and compartmentalized framework? Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and reaccentuation point in some ways to a kind of glossolalia, or multiplicity and simultaneity coexisting, a transgression of the limits set by the old testament Demiurge, and like Babel (and its magical counterpart Barbelith), punishable by a scattering to the winds. But what if the scattering (diversity) was reward rather than punishment, and glossolalia and Barbelith were coefficients of the same binary continuum? I’m sorry to run away on a theological tangent, but I believe you brought it up earlier. And perhaps this is my way out of semiotic structuralism, or at least another analogue for poesis/poetics (I’ll choose playfully not to separate them). The two key texts that particularly informed the structure of Piercing Brightness were firstly: The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which details the journey of the soul post-mortem, particularly as it moves through various levels of understanding of its loosening of the mortal coil and letting go of attachment to the material world. I used this as a way of thinking of migration and return, a priori, without the need to die first to experience a similar sense of dislocation and destabilization. The second was Philip K Dick’s final interviews, collected under the title: ‘What If Our World Is Their Heaven’. These very gentle and insightful dialogues, which speak of our world from the point of view of another civilisation, for whom it embodies not just an earthly, but a speculative paradise, neatly over-turn our central dogma, both ecclesiastical and Darwinian, of evolution towards either God or man. And point out the potentially liberating doctrine that everything we might dream of already exists – and that perhaps all it is, is a point of view.

Footnotes

Shezad Dawood trained at Central St Martin’s and the Royal College of Art before undertaking a PhD at Leeds Metropolitan University. Dawood works across various media, and much of his practice involves collaboration, frequently working with unique networks around a given project or site. These networks map across different geographic locations and communities, and are particularly concerned with acts of translation and restaging. Dawood’s work has been exhibited internationally, including as part of ‘Altermodern’, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, at Tate Britain, the 53rd Venice Biennale (both 2009), and the Busan Biennale (2010). Recent projects include a solo touring exhibition that opened at Modern Art Oxford in April 2012, and an upcoming solo exhibition at Parasol Unit, London (2014). Shezad has been nominated for the Jarman Award 2012. He currently lives and works in London, where he is Senior Lecturer and Research Fellow in Experimental Media at the University of Westminster.

Address: Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW, UK. [ email: S.Dawood@westminster.ac.uk]

Mark Bartlett is Associate Editor of animation: an interdisciplinary journal, for which he edited a special issue (November 2008) on Stan VanDerBeek. He teaches at University of the Creative Arts, Farnham in the Digital Film and Screen Arts program. Recent essays include, ‘“Animation”, figural materialism, and historiography’, in the AFI Reader Pervasive Animation, ed. Suzanne Buchan, Routledge (2013), ‘Anthropology, alienology, and indigenism in Avatar’, published in the Special Issue: Avatar of animation: an interdisciplinary journal 7(3) (November 2012); and ‘The synthesist imaginary and recyclage’ in Piercing Brightness: Shezad Dawood. Modern Art Oxford, Oxford (2012), and ‘The Culture: Intercom’, in Stan VanDerBeek: Culture Intercom, List Center for Visual Arts, MIT and Contemporary Arts Museum: Boston and Houston (2011), ‘Socialimagestics and the Fourth Avant-garde of Stan VanDerBeek; and in David Curtis et al. (eds) Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film (2010, Tate Modern Publications).

Address: Digital Film and Screen Arts, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, Falkner Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7DS, UK. [ email: mbartlett2.s1@ucreative.ac.uk]

References

Casares

(2003[1940]) The Invention of Morel. New York: New York Review of Books Classics.

Dick

(2006) What If Our World Is Their Heaven? The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick. London: Duckworth.

Foucault

(1994 [1966]) The Order of Things. New York: Vintage Books.

Roussel

(2012[2005]) Locus Solus. Richmond, Surrey: Alma Classics.