Tor Portraits, Terry Flaxton
We talked to Terry Flaxton on the occasion of his exhibition of high resolution digital works at London’s Ambika P3 gallery. On until 19 December, 10–6, Wednesday to Sunday.
Flaxton has been working as an artist and cinematographer for 25 years, and as a Senior Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at Bristol University, he has been investigating the relationship between the resolution of the digital image and audience engagement.
How – why – did you become an artist, and why moving image in particular?
For as early as I can remember I’ve had to make marks – as a teenager I called it my ‘creative urge’ – an insistent, nagging need to experiment and create images that were pleasing to me. My earliest memory is of being in a high chair, and wondering what I might talk about when I could talk! I suppose this is a cypher for having something to say in the world, about being within the human condition – and that also includes things outside of the human.
I had a few ‘visions’ when I was younger – seeing everything in the same instant – and that had a profound effect upon me – it will do for the rest of my life, in fact. But the sensibility evoked in those visions is effectively what I try to evoke in my image making. Not necessarily in a literal way. Often the ‘literal’ is wide of the mark in terms of essence; all I’m trying to do is utter a syllable that others can recognize, and that evokes the core substance of the fundamental word that is mine to say.
Alongside your art practice, you’ve always worked in other, more ‘industry’ roles, as a documentary maker, cinematographer, and running facilities and production houses. How do you balance those roles – is it a different version of you when you’re doing that kind of work as opposed to being an artist?
When I left college most of my friends entered education to make a living. I wanted to learn my medium. Had I lived in the 12th century I would have wanted to know how to mix pigment and oil. Knowing about the ‘industry’ is about knowing the medium in which I work. Often I ‘steal’ work from my industry self – as in Prisoners (1984). I shot Apple’s ‘Making of 1984′, a record of Ridley Scott’s commercial that brought the Mac into the world. With one hat on I shot the footage for Apple, with another at on I stole it, with another hat on I made the work. In fact this may have been one of my most powerful pieces.
So… my argument is that there’s no contagion, rather a beneficial cross-fertilisation of practices and discourses. I don’t think anyone else from my early generation of video practitioners did this… Now, by the way I no longer deal with ‘video’, ‘analogue’ or ‘digital’ – it’s now data, it’s all in the data – and my project is to bring the immaterial into material manifestation.
You’ve always worked in, and explored, the forefront, high end of video and digital technologies. How do you think of those technologies as ‘material’ – what particular qualities do they have for art?
Data labs are springing up around the world as a commercial response to a societal, industry need. No matter how much academics might contend that the digital is immaterial, all of the signs of materiality abound around them. After all, a roll of film is simply a reference to the experience that occurs when specific things are done to the film – shine light through it, then through a lens – and data undergoes a series of processes to manifest an image too.
In fact, film and data have more in common than film and analogue or digital video – but that’s another conversation. In the show at P3 I realised that having moved cameras around for 30 years on cranes and dollies and tracks, and also having lit extensively (including four feature films), everything I exhibited was a fixed frame with no lighting.
I also felt the need to originate prints, and in one instance I am extruding the lines via a 3D printer to manifest a digital image as a sculpture in aluminium… I find that I am busy creating and harvesting data and making it material. I no longer see any difference between materiality and immateriality in one sense – Duchamp argued for the weight and materiality of the concept, Magritte argued the issue of representation, Warhol argued that all and everything is art when regarded as such – our contemporary artistic aristocracy wrestles with the conundrums derived from all of this investigation – and on top of this we have the immaterial world forcing itself through the cracks of materiality… It is a condition, a continuum that we find ourselves within. Like fish in water we have not recognised the quality of the material we exist within – but now, with the clock set at one second to midnight, it’s time to recognise that art has to change and move beyond last century thinking. The curators are the key at this stage, but they’re bound within the grand curatorial project which limits their vision. Artists intuit the materiality of the digital, it will be a good day when the curators also recognise where we are at the end of the first decade of the 21st century.
What are the differences then… what marks the shifts along the continuum?
It’s all about intention. As Warhol noted, it’s in the use of materials and with what intent they’re used that designates their entertainment value, or their value within art.
In Other People's Skins, Terry Flaxton
In your recent works you’ve used HD where you slow things down, or where you must have asked your portrait subjects to sit still… to sort of ‘achieve stillness’. A bit like works Bill Viola’s done, but where he shows us actors emoting and ‘narrative’ scenes, you’ve made portraits of real people or ‘documented’ of real places. And I wondered if ‘fiction’ is something you’re wary of?
Viola dramatises the moment and is very successful in ‘moving’ people. I suppose I’m more Brechtian in my use of all of the functions of the medium. A documentary or documentation is as much a work of fiction as a drama – a friend of mine used to contend that all a documentary documents is the attitude of the maker toward their subject at the time of making – which is of course a fictional gesture when viewed from the present.
People do say, however, that my work ‘moves them’ – that they find it moving – like In Other People’s Skins, which toured a group of cathedrals for a long time – but I’d say that ‘movement’ is empathetic instead of lamentory. I think Viola works with lamentation sometimes (though his fundamental philosophical base seems to be the Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination which should of course be understood as being without attachment and therefore emotion) – but I guess he’s an old pro and likes to squeeze people sometimes to get people going. I guess I’m more British about things and also really wish to highlight the fundamental dignity of people (as in all my six portraiture projects from Beijing to Venice, to New York etc)… and I think sometimes, the overdramatic is uncomfortably near melodrama and melodrama doesn’t solve anything.
Your exhibition at Ambika P3 is called ‘High Resolution Moving Image Works’ – and that’s straightforward in one sense, because you’re showing… high resolution works! But it also suggests a purpose… What is the ‘resolution’ you’re in pursuit of?
I had an epiphany at the show. I found a way to demonstrate to people how our eye and mind works with regard to resolution – coining a phrase from Viola which I broadly agree with:
“Duration is to consciousness as light is to the eye.”
I would add to that:
“Resolution is to consciousness as luminance is to the eye.”
In the first phrase, we’re being asked to have patience and then something will be revealed to us. I’m arguing that with the added quality of resolution, then deeper engagement will occur. So my purpose is to reveal the deeper aesthetics of higher resolutions – because as we travel our timeline, resolution will develop so much more.
It’s a big show – big screens – it’s spectacular… What next?
Quietness and reflection will now be my way for a month. But I’m really interested in exhibiting all of these works in a different context – like the smaller galleries in the East End of London. I want to change the context of its display. I want young gallery owners and art students who’re putting on pop-ups to contact me and I’ll gladly join in with smaller projects because art has to change from the big gallery to the small and become local! These are exciting times to be an artist.
