The Exhibited Ruins: Bill Morrison and Eric Rondepierre’s Cinematographic Decompositions
(2018) Times and Movements of the Image — Location: Lisbon University (15.November.2018)
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- Abstract
- This presentation will tackle a new status of the ruin within contemporary images. The ruins are traditionally apprehended by Art History as a nostalgic decorum or a romantic pattern, in other words as a symbol or a classic landscape of Western representation. We would like to examine here a new aspect of the ruin which appears in some contemporary practices. We will not consider the image of the ruin but on the ruin of the image itself and how certain contemporary artists use it to reflect on image temporalities. More specifically we would like to focus and the works of two artists, Bill Morrison and Eric Rondepierre. They both share a same material: decaying silent films footages. Both former painters, these artists play with the organic fragility and the inevitable destruction of the filmic material. They both decompose and produce a new montage of these images already decomposing. The ruins are not, in their works, simply a symbolic reference to destruction or fragmentation but interrogate, by their manipulations, the aesthetic status of the ruin (Habib 2011). They confer to the material incidents of time an aesthetic value of their own. Eric Rondepierre takes pictures of photograms. His particular procedure is based on media hybridity and implies, among others, the existence of the VHS and the freeze frame (Lenain 1998). The pictures of Précis de décomposition (1995) or Moires (1998), show, in two different ways, the invisibility of the filmic image. The invisibility of the destruction of course, but also, the invisibility of the photogram itself which is, as Rondepierre write it, the image sacrificed for the benefit of the optical illusion. Bill Morrison’s experimental films (Decasia. The State of Decay 2002, Light is Calling 2004) feature segments of damaged silent films. His work does not integrate these segments into a new narrative, but on the contrary, preserves the original structure. The editing focuses on the overlay of the same photogram. This repetition convulses the filmic continuity and at the same time creates the stability of this destruction itself. Each of their work exposes, in this perspective, a relic-image of primitive cinema. they imply an image of time understood as negativity, as what has been and no longer is. In this way, they show that, unlike Bazin's famous statement (1958), the film - art of movement and time – is not an immortal art but, more than any other form of art, subject to the destruction of time. However, the works of Morrison and Rondepierre also reopen the time of the image by conferring a new permanence to its fragility. from this point of view, their work reverses Georg Simmel famous sentence: it is not only "the fascination of ruin that the work of man appears to us entirely as a product of nature", but rather, the opposite (SIMMEL 1911). The fascination provoked by these particular ruins is that the work of nature appears to us entirely as a product of man. Without falling into a divine or achiropoietic theory, these artists play with the arbitrary disintegration of materiality. These images are fundamentally uncertain. Showing the work of time, they question in fine the stability of the work of art itself (POUILLAUDE 2014).
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Pfeiffer, N. (2018). The Exhibited Ruins: Bill Morrison and Eric Rondepierre’s Cinematographic Decompositions. Times and Movements of the Image, Lisbon University. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/173527