Vampyr

Half a page of text following the imagination of a film. A shadow moving across the wall without an antecedent body. Elizabeth Price’s Vampyr watched in its absence during the original 1932 version of the film. The difficulty of sustaining the conceit throughout because of enduring interference of the present image. The impossible absence of the stony-faced man, the wax, the thickness of a corpse, the doctor’s bag; the impossible presence of  theatre seats in their stead. The attempt to serially unsee the picture as it persistently unfolds. The fragility, between breaths, of hallucinating its inverse and superimposing the negative over the positive to flood the celluloid with black.

In Memory of the Image

I found myself eating V.I.P. breakfast croissants in the Elegance Lounge (or something) at the Frieze Art Fair this morning. I am not a real V.I.P. but ate my croissants with panache so nobody could tell. After croissants a Frieze Talk was beginning just as we walked past, and so we went in. The talk was called “In Memory of the Image”, and turned out to be a panel discussion between with Stuart Comer, George Baker and two moving image artists Morgan Fisher and Hito Steyerl.

Morgan Fisher showed the first three minutes of a twenty-one minute film called “(      )”. I’m not sure how much space there should be between the opening and closing parenthesis of the title but what I’ve typed is about proportional to how far apart he held his two cupped hands when he paused in the middle of his sentence to articulate the title.

There In Time

We’re going to call the Liverpool Biennial show There In Time.

It’s an Independents exhibition curated by Jo Moore at the Bridewell Gallery, and I’m one of three artists exhibiting alongside Mark Simpson (whose photograph is above) and Emily Speed.

Until the shot went on and on and on

Anton sent me a link to a post on Infinite Thought. Of interest, he thought, given our talks.

“I perched in discomfort on the end of my bed and announced ‘I think if there’s a woman with nothing on appearing on the screen no one’s going to listen to the words’, suggesting perhaps he could film our ‘This Exploits Women’ stickers on the tube. Godard gave me a baleful look, his lip curled. ‘Don’t you think I am able to make a c*** boring?’, he exclaimed. We were locked in a conflict over a fleeting ethnographic moment.