BATTLE SPONGE: What price a cinematic embrace?

A totemic place for an allegorical experience.

...intermission from my residency...

Cinema, as well as other mediums such as writing, art and music, have the unique opportunity to explore our desires, fears and regrets unashamedly and collectively. They also have the power to say things that can't be said elsewhere, such as on the news, in parliament, at the bus stop, in school - they can test ideas for us; rehearse us.

But cinema (as well as some TV) has the visuals, the urgency and movement, the characters, the text and dialogue. These things occur in art, writing and music, but not all together. Sometimes music is the most powerful because it leaves the visuals and characters more to our imagination; but sometimes that is too emotional. I find music terribly overwhelming and feel a bit disabled after listening to some musicians because I can't match up my own life to the one i'm imagining! The is definitely good exercise for the brain in terms of escapism. (a kind of exercise I want to promote with my art even if I can't achieve it directly for viewers - and let's be honest, from what i've said above, art can't really do that.) But where music lets you get carried away, a film or a TV episode is written to a narrative that finishes at just the right point to reign your imagination in and keep it on track. You can't often watch the same film back to back like you can do with music. With film, the high feeling you get is halted and kept constant, then wound down slowly once the visuals are taken away from you. This, I think, is why viewers can carry the experience into their own life/environment scenario and begin to effect a change with that stimulus. You keep feeling the feeling, but accept that the experience cannot continue, and so feel that feeling in your own life.

Characters, their ideals and relationships, scenarios, environment and settings and locations... these all make us attached to a film. The act of visiting these in a cinema (indoor, outdoor) is, for the individual viewer, a framing of that experience as something slightly more elevated than watching on a small screen. It's just more epic. I can't put my finger on it, but I've always really enjoyed the cinematography aspect of films - it's really good placement for the mind and body, and maybe this on such a large scale is part of the effect. When that is image is proportionate to your body; can fit you into it, that might be the magic.

For the collective audience of a cinema screen, the viewing experience is communal. It opens discussions and can highlight common desires, or common fears and discomforts.

Yesterday I watched an episode of Home and Away in which my all time favourite TV character Darryl Braxton departed. I was pretty sad eh!!

But the actor who plays him said this about his character leaving:

"I think the key to any good TV series or any good storytelling is to leave the audience at the right point, and where we got to with Brax, we hit a point where it was the best point for him to exit the show. It was just the perfect time I guess".

I think this sort of demonstrates what I was saying about film and TV having a narrative that cannot be continued, allowing the viewer to get on with other things - in my case, preferably, effecting a change they've been inspired to make by watching the film. I can definitely say that from watching Home and Away I am inspired to improve community connections and appreciate small town life, and to move out of the city, hopefully to the beach. And to also be more healthy - none of the characters party hard, and most of them exercise! I know this sounds cheesy. But this whole idea of being inspired by art forms, and effecting change, is cheesy. So ride with it.

Now endure the beauty of Brax's departing scenes: car crash during his prison transfer, survives, escapes, however he is presumed dead, must stay dead so his enemies don't target his gilrfriend Ricky and his babbin, hugs his best mate Ash and gives him his possessions to burn, goes to see Ricky and his kid Casey (named after his murdered bro - it's just one tragedy after another for the Braxton Brothers), looks at her mournfully through the foliage, she sees the trees move as he turns to go but doesn't believe anyone was really there, he sits in his car and looks at a family photo and realises everything he's leaving, but he has to... and he takes off.... alas. I cry.

So - i'm approaching the cinema space as place in which an allegorical experience can take place. It's like a ritual space/sacred space. Visual symbols i'm exploring to the effect, to use in paintings and installations, are:

totem poles

forecourts

circular spaces

viewing points

talismanic, symbolic objects (often from nature)

ritual garments; cloaks, shrouds, capes, pouches and pockets, mats.

shrines

priestesses and priests, sorcerers, seeing beings

branches

fire

water

symmetry

Then come cinematic features will be:

screens

seats

aisles

booths

lighting

the time of day/night

duration

location (often framed or idealised)

And symbolic objects, or events, can be anything. Here's a taste:

From The Summer Book by Tove Jansson:

"...the swallows that only honour the houses where the people are happy."

And from the Indigenous Australia exhibition at the British Museum - i can't remember the context., but I think it describes a painting. But, what a beaut sentiment about the treachery of messing with symbolic territory and matter?!?

"The mens' harpoons strike the sacred rock, causing the ancestral fires to flare and boil the water. The canoe capsizes and they drown. The ancestral crocodile Baru swims with the fire through the sacred waters. For Yolngu people, fire represents a profound knowledge that must be handled with wisdom and courage."

The bananas are, as ever, making an appearance at this point - as a symbol of urgency of experience.

Below is a proposed installation I hope I will be able to realise properly soon.

Guiltiplex

Leisure pursuits don’t prompt us to engage in a wider world. This installation is a literal framing of the cinema as a passive or active experience; are you engaged in the context of your own entertainment channels? As a viewer you are off screen, but you are still within the frame of experience; implicated by knowledge and observation. Your own choices about your cultural engagement are brought before you, as is the expectation to act upon your resultant feelings and findings from a cinema, and leisure (food, travel, entertainment), experience in general.

This cinema seat makes it hard to decide to sit down; it’s hard to be passive. The bananas would be ruined.

Bananas are a potent symbol of socio-political and environmental unease and fragility. Such a common, and comical, fruit hints at the everyday urgency surrounding the need for personal civic engagement. As a foreign fruit grown in colonial countries however, the use of bananas also considers the extent to which the entertainment and leisure industry can be culturally and socially exploitative, and its demand for out-sourcing and importation of goods and services. This clearly has both socio-political and environmental ramifications. This is also a concept concerning boundaries and frames of communities and cultures. Where is a line drawn between ‘leisure’ supply and demand across a globalised world?

The plastic sheeting and frame here suggest a cinema screen. Plastic offers a concept of transparency; another operational concern in the modern Global world. The plastic also represents the over-packaging of food products, and gives a claustrophobic feel. To add fuel to the fire, I gathered this un-recyclable plastic (a petroleum product) from the bins of my local high street during July, which has been trending as #noplasticmonth on twitter.

Painted banana ‘guns’ are seen from three angles, each angle implicating the viewer in different ways; protagonist, bystander or victim. The banana is the weapon and you are the smoking gun. Every citizen has a responsibility to acknowledge the frame of their own leisure desires in the wider world.

Viewers are invited to wander around the screen, entering the frame of view and experience; becoming part of the action. They may take a banana to eat, further implicating them into the world story.

Overall this installation is a question about boundaries between passivity and engagement during leisure time; how much of what we experience in the Western developed world is truly necessary, or is simply a concocted luxury ‘need’. The ‘frame’ of the cinema experience suggests something beyond the edge of a screen.

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And below is an sculptur-y thing i've been designing. I'm looking at the physical forces of sculpture to suggest nature is teetering on the edge of an abyss. It's also slightly looking like a winch or a hammock type thing - holding the horizontal tree up. Which itself is held up by tip structures; a self-sufficient, resourceful invention, closely linked to indigenous and travelling cultures who practice rituals alongside the outdoors, worshiping and honouring it and asking it provide.

My design is sort of a messed up ritual - habitation gone wrong.

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And below are photos from my album called Grandma's Last Winter. This was New Year in Jersey, as well a couple of other from the same roll of film.

The view from my favourite place in Jersey, in St Ouen's. About 10 mins walk from Dom's house. There's a natural amphitheatre here where they do a gig in the summer, but it's perfect for an outdoor cinema.

St Ouen's beach

Jersey has the best grass

The chicken house in St Ouen. I love this place, it's ruled by these creatures. This should really be a film. They are so loud. It doesn't even look like anyone lives here, but there are well over 100 chickens.

A portion of painting in progress, currently titled '8 Florence Street - i've never felt less like myself'

In the woods outside Brighton. Totem pole here for reference.

A handsome man in the woods

And below is Jersey in the summer - last week I was in the charming place. London is all the stinkier, busier and more landlocked for it. And this is where we need to listen to Landlocked Blues by Bright Eyes - a highly emotional and cinematic song.