Strings of Time
Strings of Time: Figurations of the 'Virtual Hopper'.
Discourse and figure operate as two different
and incommensurable dimensions that nonetheless
never cease to communicate with each other even within the space of the eye.1
The present text is a proposition to take a closer look at Izabella Gustowska's multimedia installation Strings of Time from the perspective of Edward Hopper's painting.2 Gustowska analyzes her own experience of this painting, which is based on dialogue between Hopper and film. Strings of Time and especially its two opening parts – The Case of Edward H. and The Case of Iza G. – appears as a work that with great accuracy visualizes the field of influence of the 'virtual Hopper'– of images active not only as material objects or reproductions but as mental images and traces recognizable in other areas of art and visual culture.
Since 1980s Hopper has experienced a kind of Nachleben3: repetition, reproduction, citation, pictorial afterimage or spectrum, all constitute an uncertain, often ephemeral and at the same time fundamental basis for contemporary reception and functioning of these paintings. A series of international exhibitions, the comeback of interests in medium of painting, postmodernist aesthetics of pastiche, appropriation as well as new technological possibilities have altogether created favourable conditions for the virtual potential of Hopper's paintings to activate. By reason of their particular combination of distinct, recurring structural and compositional solutions, only slightly internally diversified and contrasting fields of colour and motionlessness provoking a narrative projection, these works leave a lasting trace in spectators' memory, generating a dialogic modus of their reception. One might say that these paintings 'desire' to be quoted, to dialogue, to engage in contact with the other.4
Hopper's work has been very often linked to cinema, and on various levels. Firstly, it is about the recurring in his oeuvre iconography of theatres and cinemas, as well as biographical trace of the painter's passion for films and, what comes with it, frequent visits to cinemas. The latter fact provided a reason for scholars to search for potential influences of film aesthetics, especially film noir, on his work. At the same time, there is a good deal of commentaries regarding an opposite direction of influences – going from the painting to certain set design solutions of some film makers. What was pointed out in both cases was the iconography, strong chiaroscuro, suspense of the represented situation, withheld yet suggestive narration, framing that implies either some continuation outside of the painting or a view from a train window.5 On the other hand, contemporary directors, such as Herbert Ross, Wim Wenders and most recently Andrzej Wajda, used Hopper's paintings, recreating them in a form of tableaux vivant.6 There are multiple examples of this kind. However, these are not only obvious, intentional citations of Hopper, rather an effect of reception: numerous films activate the memory of specific works or Hopperesque aesthetics which constitute – along with Hopper's dialogue with other paintings, photography and broad scope of visual culture – virtual horizon of functioning of these pictures.
Although in the context of Stings of Time, a work that uses digital image and modern technology of its processing, the notion of virtuality may seem quite obvious, its definition proposed here has a slightly broader reach. The word 'virtual' originates from the Latin virtus – meaning 'the power to act without intervention of matter'; something that belongs to a certain type of objects 'functionally or effectively, yet not formally'.7 It would hence imply action which transgresses their material existence, even though they may be – as it is in the case of Hopper's paintings – strictly interconnected. Moreover, as stated by Wolfgang Welsch, virtuality has always been part of reality.8 In Aristotle's philosophy it had its counterpart in the notion of dynamis, describing something potential, waiting to be actualized. Without potentiality there is no actualization – they belong to the same order, even though located on opposite ends of the ontological continuum. The term 'virtuality' instead of 'potentiality' was first introduced by Thomas Aquinas and throughout centuries its meaning oscillated between ontological and epistemological dimensions. However, the most important for this discussion is the constituted by Henri Bergson in the early 19th century identification of virtuality with immateriality of memory, which is strictly connected to perception that links the current with the past. The French philosopher explains that perception is 'completely overfilled with memory-images, which complement and at the same time interpret it'.9 Hence, what we see is always co-seen with another image, be it a memory image or – expanding Bergson's thought – phantasmatic projection evoked by the object of perception. In this sense the 'virtual Hopper' is the Hopper reminded of or recognized in the other, but also the other recognized in it. As a result, an extended field of image and its perception comes to being – a virtual plane of differentiation, of reciprocal exchange, interpretation and transformation, grasped by Gustowska in Strings of Time as a part of her own experience.
I will focus on two opening parts of the project, firstly because of the perspective chosen for this text; and secondly due to the fact that the other two parts are still in the process of production. The first is called The Case of Edward H. and it consists of forty-three films constructed with the use of found footage.10 Each of the few-minute-long films organically unites one – and each time a different one – painting by Hopper, 'explored' by a virtual camera, and a fragment of a feature film (in order to avoid ambiguity, I will refer to the film parts as 'cinematic'). In the second part, entitled The Case of Iza G., the object of vision and the 'actress' of the films presented in a form of video projections or on a monitor, becomes the artist herself: we see her at her home or in the open air, for instance in USA, on sets referring to fragments of the paintings or films from the first part. By means of visual filiation or connotation, these fragments decide about the place and situation, in which Iza G. will appear. She is an artist and at the same time a character of interpictorial phantasm (the spectator can take his/her own perspective or the one of narcissistically doubled, and hence split artist's subject). At times, Hopper's paintings appear in a directed scene as mise-en-abyme, e.g. in a form of a painting on a computer screen. In this part Gustowska's piece is no longer an exteriorization of differentiation of the two elements paired together at the intersection of perception and memory, but it expands the area of operation of the subject-artist itself, and visualizes the ambivalent, balancing on the edge of image and reality, virtual-real space of Iza G.'s life. An image – be it a painting or a film – creates a space of performative, virtual engagement in it. Part three, which is not yet completed, The Case of Josephine H., will be focusing on the figure of Hopper's wife. As a whole, Strings of Time will finish with the third part Hybrids of Space-Time – a large, black and white and blue projection accompanied by thirty-three objects containing photographic frames with transformed quotations from the films that have appeared in the previous parts of the piece. The film itself, presented in a form of projection, does not refer directly to the previously mentioned paintings. A limited colour scale creates a common ground for all the 'cases', which in this context appear as if fished up from the space-time universe. This part converges, and at the same time develops and generalizes the reflection stemming from the previous parts dealing with the complexity of experiencing and being in time and space.
Each of the hybrid films constituting the first two parts of the Strings of Time may be regarded as an autonomous whole – condensed, yet looped, and hence potentially infinite audiovisual event. Horizontal movement of a virtual camera goes along with vertical dynamics of oftentimes sudden zoom-outs and zoom-ins: the eye-camera searches for the optimum path of vision, not only does it record, but it also provides interpretation. The dominant painted image is gradually permeated, differentiated by sound or chromatic permutations, signalizing an indwelling underlayer of the film, which finally appears thanks to morphing transition from one image to another.11 Then the situation is to a certain point reversed. The eye of Gustowska's camera is also a remembering and, synesthetically, hearing eye. Therefore, the combination of images is based on sound, analogy of motif, often supported by similarities of structure and colour, historical mise-en-scene of representation, atmosphere or the dialogue lines, and even of word, whose visual referent or connotation creates a link between images. On the other hand, the 'natural' sensory-motor rhythm of the cinematic clip becomes additionally modified by slowing down and speeding the picture up, momentary standstills and displacements or repetitions. As a result, it turns out that we are not dealing with subsequence of painted and cinematic image, but their coexistence in layers within the whole Gustowska's film; the screen, manifesting its fluid, 'porous' status, as indicated by its double meaning, both exposes and obscures, and the difference lays in the temporally changeable intensity of visibility and audibility of the pictorial layers. One might talk about an interface of dialogue between film and painting. Andrzej Gwóźdź states that the essence of interface is that 'being located on a junction of two modalities or materiality/immateriality of communication, two phases of convergence of elements, it poses an obstacle in connection between them, but at the same time it enables such connection, and its development is marked by tension between both poles and the desire to annihilate one of them. Appearing and disappearing – that is the nature of interfaces...'12
Although it seems that looping the film makes it possible to start reading it at any given moment, and the reproduction does not dominate over the cinematic part and vice versa, substantial difference appears in the way of transition: the return from cinematic fragment to the painting is sudden, deprived of a smooth opening, almost unprepared. Such situation may indicate the starting point of association – going from painting to film, even though the relation is not so obvious in the course of perception.13 The result of this interpictorial exchange is an intermedial, multilayered, visible-audible form of continuous permeation of painting and film.
As Gustowska uses reproductions, strong close-ups reveal the illustration's grain, obscured, at times blurred shapes of represented things. The paradox is that they give off an impression of an even stronger 'painterly quality' of the replicated image. The use of reproductions appears not only to be the result of technical difficulties, which working on original paintings would inevitably bring, but it also bears a critical potential, referring to the intensive circulation of Hopper's paintings in reproduction and the risk of gain and loss that comes with it. The grain of reproduction made visible in the close-up is the price included in the total costs that the paintings pay for their virtual Nachleben. At the same time, however, it simulates the layer of signifiers that determine the real trait of these works as painted images, which in close look clearly reveal strokes of brush and paint. Indeed, the impact that Hopper's paintings bear lays in this subtle logic of concealing their status of paintings. Such 'concealment' however is not the same as lack; without it, the works would not open so effectively to the other, they would lose their paradoxical 'differential specificity'.
Screen interface as visualized plane of virtual transformations and displacements brings to mind Jean-Francois Lyotard's concept of the figure. The space of the figure – of what is figural – is close to the abovementioned definition of virtuality as a weave of signifiers coming from different orders and codes, whose form obliterates clear distinctions between them.14 In Strings of Time this relation is exposed by the way painting and film coexist as digitally modified space in which image, sound, spoken and written word permeate one another. Lyotard based his concept of Freudian model of transforming the energy of drive in the unconscious through primary processes (displacement, condensation), which deform all representation in chiasm of layers of image and language that balance each other out. In the most profound form of figure-matrix the figural is a mere difference and hence it is not directly representable: it emerges as a symptom of active energy, in a form of a phantasm, representation of 'non-spatial perception', and at the same time 'space of the virtual and the unforeseen, a pictorial polyphony'.15 What is symptomatic, Lyotard writes about the idea of Paul Klee's painting as a field of Zwischenwelt, of the world in between, which is the 'displayed workshop of the primary process. Here one does not speak or "see", one works.'16 D. N. Rodowick intelligently sums up his own overview of the French philosopher's concept, and says that along with the so caused crack in the cohesion of discourse, the figural 'is a virtual dimension where perception is freed from reality testing, and where words and things transform one into the other with the fluidity of hallucinated objects. More radically, even the scenography and enunciative structure of this »space« is perturbed by the uncoded flows of desire, producing a superimposition of contradictory points of view, incommensurable narrative scenes, and achronological layers of memory.'17 Such imbrication, as the American scholar further explains, defines ontology of images in the times of new digital, simulated and virtual media. In Strings of Time the figural manifests itself most vividly in the moment of extreme tension, of the distorting transition between the elements of the film, which – like a screen – reveals what was only signalized, and at the same time obscures and deforms what was hitherto seen. Individual visibility of the two images becomes annulled in favour of the differentiating, temporary co-being, and manifestation of figurality; in other words: figuration of the virtual (Hopper).
*
Let us have a look.
In several scenes of the first part of Gustowska's installation the cinematic fragment might be read as imaginary projection of characters in the painting. In the film that uses Hopper's painting Compartment C, Car 293 a simulated camera sets the direction of the look from the lamp to the window view saturated with red, and farther, slowly leads us to a woman sitting and reading a magazine in a train compartment. The screen image becomes at that time saturated with green, which dominates in the painting. The soundtrack is initially merely the sound of a train, and when the camera shifts from the magazine pages to the woman's head, marking the relation between what is read or looked at and the mind of the painting's protagonist, we hear cabaret music. When the camera stops on the woman's head, the train clatter merges with the music as if there was a maximum tension between the 'the now' of the image and a time-space layer that goes far beyond it. Painted image gives place to the emerging cinematic image. The protagonist of Cotton Club (dir. F. F. Coppola, 1984) is singing and exchanging romantic looks with a handsome trumpeter. The scene here seems to be a phantasmatic projection or a memory of the woman; it offers an answer to the recurring, in the context of Hopper's lonely characters, questions about what goes on their minds at the given moments. More importantly, the film visualizes the multilayer, unbreakable relation of text (read by the woman) and the order of the imaginary.
Hopper's painting Summer Evening (1947) is interwoven with the film The Notebook (dir. N. Cassavetes, 2004). The camera, in a medium close-up, leads through the painting starting from the standing young couple, then goes to the window and door, as if willing to peek inside the house, breaking the visible limit of the wall and the paint at the same time; beyond this limit there is in fact the space of the feature movie. Suddenly, as if coming from this space, we hear an inquiring man's voice and recurring at several-second-long intervals sounds of passionate scuffle and a kiss – the soundtrack builds up suspense, and becomes a symptom of an undercurrent presence of the not yet visible, but already heard film. Next, a close-up on the couple is accompanied by a question from the film: 'Do you wanna go somewhere?' which in a way complements the gesture and body twist of the boy in the painting, connoting his engagement in the dialogue, an attempt to explain or convince the girl about something. After a while the image changes into a cinematic extract showing a teenage couple (Noah and Allie) meeting on a porch just like the one from the painting. Familiar sounds and words find their completion in the cinematic scene, and tie together the two parts of Gustowska's film. But the sound is not synchronized with the picture, it becomes displaced, and such displacement signalizes that the mental nexus of the cinematic extract and painting inevitably distorts the original rhythm and temporal order. Another thing that becomes distorted is the movement of characters: repeated, doubled, and almost slowed down by the still image of the painting. As a result, neither the painting becomes filmic nor the film becomes painterly, but a new, varied, multisensory level of virtuality is created.
By contrast, the painting American Village (1912), early and less characteristic of Hopper's work, and Road to Perdition (dir. S. Mendes, 2002) are linked by certain trait of formlessness. The painting shows a street seen from a bird's-eye view. Black diagonal strip along the bottom line of the painting locates the viewer on a kind of rail or road over-pass, so that s/he is right above the road. The distance and the perspective of viewing along with a freer, impasto approach towards the definition of shapes in the painting makes the marking of the forms of carriages and people more general and their objective references come to a great extent from the context of the painted image. Simulated camera slowly approaches the painting; it does not become clearer because of that, but, thanks to narrowed framing, the dark spots of colour (the reproduction makes them even more obscure) signifying a carriage or a person, gain autonomy of a shapeless trace. Finally, a sudden, rapid close-up and then a retreat of the camera, simulate body movement or 'zoom of an eye' of a spectator trying to get closer to the canvas in order to study the detail more carefully. Along with the transition into the cinematic part, the implied position of the spectator is placed at street level, where the protagonist of Road to Perdition carries out an execution on his former collaborators. It is dark and raining heavily. All of a sudden, we see a white flash in the background, which creates a little spot sparkling for a moment; its referent (fire of a machine gun) without knowing the film is far from obvious. Subsequently, in slow motion, a black, hardly visible silhouette comes out of the rain and approaches the camera. A man and the gunfire appear as counterparts of paint spots signifying vehicles and people. These elements lose their referents within the limits of their own image in favour of a meaning that crystallizes in relation to the other.
What might serve as a sum-up (which might as well be an introduction) of the first part of Strings of Time is a film based on a motif of a man wearing a hat, referring to Hopper's Self-Portrait (1925-30).18 The artist wearing a hat, a jacket, a blue shirt and a tie is shown from his chest up, shown en trois quarts, aims his gaze at the viewer. The background of a wall, a fragment of a door and diagonal floor in the right bottom corner locate the artist in an only minimally specified, 'transitional' space, recalling the impersonally furnished corridors or hotel rooms that we know from his other works. However, the transitional character of this space is also based on pictorial process of referring to or transition into the other. Moreover, it is hard not to get the impression that Hopper appeared in the frame of his painting suddenly and unexpectedly, as if he had stepped into it from the left and was stopped by a photographic snapshot or a freeze-frame, and, as if in a film, he is about to disappear from the picture on the right, according to the direction suggested by the diagonal floor in the corner.
To suit her purpose, Gustowska 'cropped' Hopper's composition into a form of and ID photograph and removed the colour. That way, she neutralized the suggestion of horizontal continuation, the movement to the right, in favour of a vertical order of repetition in a-few-second-long fragments of films quoted in Strings of Time showing men in hats. They were also appropriately framed, reduced to shades of black and white and slightly transformed in terms of sound and movement. The artist's identity inscribed in the convention of a portrait becomes somewhat dispersed, which in a way legitimizes Hopper's status as a trace validated by a signature. Here, Hopper becomes a palimpsest, over-written or 'changed' by the hat-wearing faces; but at the same time, carried by the power of visual association, he becomes present as a phantom, controlling and keeping together this part of Gustowska's piece. In the last cinematic fragment used by the artist, the hat is doffed in a gesture of greeting, resembling a situation of a momentary meeting of two acquaintances passing each other on a street.19 Repeatedly quoted, finally raised hat becomes a figure of visual recognition of the other, a wordless, directed at the viewer, salutation between the images.
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In the second part entitled The Case of Iza G. dialoguing with Hopper is no longer in its character a virtual meeting between the film and painting images: visual substance of Hopper's paintings or the dialoguing films becomes somewhat diluted, and the element that brings all the films together is the artist herself as the subject and object of look. In the other films comprising this part, traces of Hopper are at times distinct, on the one hand through the motif that organizes the position or spatial situation of the artist/film protagonist, Iza G., on the other through its direct appearance in the frame; other times they disappear in favour of the frame set by cinematic fragment. Iza G. however is not necessarily just a name of an 'artist-in-a-film', she can be also perceived as the referent of the riven subject, not visible, oscillating in subsequent parts between the artist, Izabella Gustowska and the protagonist of her film who appears in a space more or less clearly marked by the images the viewer is familiar with (for the clarity of discourse, I will identify Iza G. as the artist-in-a-film). Here, the hybrid in terms of time-space image becomes not only a visualization of the mediated by look and memory figuration of the virtual, but also a phantasmatic self-projection of the subject. It is a structure of fantasy, aptly described by Mikkel Broch-Jacobsen: 'The fantasy [...] is there in front of me, in the mode of Vorstellung: I (re)present it to myself. Better still, I (re)present myself through some "other," some identificatory figure [...]. But the point from which I contemplate the scene—the fantasy's "umbilical cord," we might say [...] is not offstage. I am in the fantasy.'20 The line between what is real and what is phantasmatic is blurred. As Mieke Bal wrote, the splitting of the subject creates a space for a cultural dimension of fantasy and 'makes it a good place to look for an integrated analysis of both what a viewer sees, including the projections inevitably informing that vision and how that projection happens.'21 Therefore, in the case of the second part of Strings of Time one might talk about an extended field of interpenetration of art – or more broadly – of image with life, that is about an active, performative engagement in that image, when the corporeal subject simultaneously becomes an object of his/her own fantasy framed by a hybrid image.
Let us have one last look.
In one of the films we see Iza G. at her home, sitting at a desk on which there are two monitors. One of them shows the film known from the previous parts of the piece, based on a fragment of Hopper's New York Office (1962) and Once Upon a Time in America (dir. S. Leone, 1984), on the other we see the face of Iza G. synchronically recorded with a mini-camera, like a narcissistic screen 'reflection'. After a while there is a close-up and the screens become the main object of vision. In the office window depicted by Hopper a woman is standing, and below, on a desk there is a telephone. Already known from the first part of Strings of Time, the close-up on the telephone merges with the ring tone from Leone's film. On Iza G.'s desk there is also a telephone, which she picks up as if responding to the pictorial-cinematic impulse, suggesting a possibility of contact between the two different orders of reality. At one point the two monitors merge into one. The central part of the hybrid screen becomes strongly distorted, which makes this fragment of the image indecipherable. Such illegibility appears as both a clear symptom of differentiation of the images and the overlapping of several pictorial orders: the mirror-like, mediated by the screen, Iza G.'s 'reflection', Hopper's painting and the fragment of the film. This might be interpreted as metareflection on the artist's own project. Through Iza G. Gustowska performs an auto-inscription in The Case of Edward H., thereby emphasizing the extended field of the second part of Strings of Time and their story within a story structure. Not only did Gustowska visualize the horizon of functioning of Hopper's paintings and films stamped by them, but she also placed herself in the virtual fold of their visuality. At the same time an idea of ontologically unstable subject, fluidly interpenetrating different pictorial spaces, emerges. We are dealing with extending the field of trace (non)presence, which is a constitutive element of contemporary being in the world; it does not negate it, but partly allows us to exist in a different way, and partly makes us realize what has become suppressed in the name of stable ontological-epistemological regimes. Therefore, Strings of Time also calls for a more general and very current reflection on the complex structure of time and space and the unbreakable 'techno-organic' relation between reality and the domain of images, both physical and virtual ones.
Filip Lipiński