DARIO ŠOLMAN

The Heart of Perspective, the Making of the Film

2001-2009 New York

 PM Gallery

6.10. - 01. 11.

The Heart of Perspective, the Making of the Film

2001-2009 New York

The Heart of Perspective, the Making of the Film, is the experimental art project that includes drawings, animation, video, storyboards and written materials. Web site filmlog.org (www.filmolog.org) is integral part of the project, following its development chronologically. All the multimedia components research related visual and narrative themes, and conceptually resemble the early stage of the film production. Diverse elements that make a series of visual/narrative modules will never reach synthesis and become a conventional film. The non-linear and open structure will remain.

Exhibition was made possible by the grants of the Ministry of Culture Republic of Croatia and City of Zagreb, City Office of Culture, Educations and Sport, Jerome Foundation and FaceCroatia. 

Dario Solman and Conor McGrady: A Conversation

CM: In your recent work I know that you use perspective in the title, with connotations of how perspective functions in space – how it impacts the dynamics of power, the spatial dimension of experience.

DS: In the arts, perspective is a drawing technique used to create an illusion of three-dimensional space on the two-dimensional surface of the paper or canvas. More broadly, perspective describes the way the eye interprets space.

I remember art history classes about pre-renaissance art at the Zagreb Art Academy. In the Gothic or early Renaissance painting, before perspective was used, sizes of figures in a painting were established by their significance: Jesus was the biggest, saints were second in size, rich patrons were smaller, and so on according to the hierarchy. This made me wonder: if a person from that era looked at perspective painting, they would wonder why a person appears larger, just because they happen to be closer in space. It’d seem like a trivial reason compared to the totality of the mythology.

An interesting thing about the use of perspective is that it always implies a subject; it implies an eye that is looking at the given scene. This is unlike some other modes of presentation such as 2D projection in Egyptian art, or isometric projection in technical drawing. In some of my videos like Worship and Screening, I use the isometric projection. It has an interesting effect - it positions the viewer in an unclear relationship to the observed and gives it a God-like omniscient view.

However, when we use perspective in realistic painting, which is based on the mimetic depiction of reality, we want the image to function as a window into another word. Something similar happens in other forms of art like novels and films. Perspective there describes the relationship between the story and storyteller. Their main attraction is that we are transported to another place and that we forget that we are looking at art. The audience is not supposed to be aware of discreet techniques that enable this experience. I use perspective as a sort of metaphor for these discreet techniques.

CM: In terms of techniques of engaging the viewer, I’m interested in models of presentation that feature iconic images; in particular as a way of looking at power and how it manifests in individuals and social situations. Some of the recent work directly uses iconic imagery - a businessman on a throne with two lions for example. This is not something drawn from contemporary reality, but is more about desire - the desire for power. Its an idealized depiction of how many businessmen would like to see themselves – on a throne, surrounded by lions.

DS: That painting is loaded with mythological meaning.

CM: I’m interested in the phenomenon of archetypes, which is a whole other discussion in itself. Five years ago my work was clearly about situations of military occupation and social control, largely drawing on my background in being from in N. Ireland, but these days it’s more ambiguous, tapping into psychological or mythological space. It’s imagined social orders or imagined states of being, either within individuals or within collectives that interest me. For example, there is a policewoman in a painting breastfeeding a baby in a cornfield. There are certain populations who really identify with this form of militant maternalism – that they don’t divorce the role of being a mother with that of being a servant of the state. It’s based on a group of pro war, anti- abortion protestors I once saw at a counter demonstration to an anti-war march. One of them had a placard that read, “Protect Our Unborn Troops”. The idea is that this is not just an embryo - this is the next generation of troops. This is almost thinking on the level of science fiction. Militarized women are breeding the next generation of fighters against an imaged enemy in a war with no end in site. It’s still about an imagined social space – the idea that the nation is an imaged social space and the mythologies that go into constructing it are a mixture of reality and falsehood. The work still comes from real situations of civil unrest - but moves into imagined realms of space or imaged social order. Not just that imagined by right wing lunatics, but also how this idealized sense of being filters into the general populace. In most idealized space there is some element of nature. Utopia, military or otherwise, always has a natural dimension to it.

DS: Looking at your work I see condensed moments of narrative that appear as excerpts from a larger whole. For example you have a civilian leading a group of policemen. This mysterious moment inspires the imagination of the viewer to guess and recreate what happened before and after. A whole story is suggested through a single image, an excerpt.

Classic European Christian painting tells a story, but not in a continuous linear way. There is a superstructure i.e. the Bible leads you, and between images, you’re given enough space to fill in the blanks and have a creative response. This is unlike the classic 19th century novel or conventional Hollywood film, where you’re constantly told what’s going on, where to go, where to look; you’re led by hand from point A to point B. You’re not allowed, like in an Ozu movie to look sideways, into a scene not strictly connected with the storyline. However, once you’re given some creative space and open multiple levels, than the audience can engage. It’s a form of interactivity - a very popular word in this computer era. But there is interactivity that is much more subtle. For example when you’re reading a book - your imagination is working, creating images and characters.  When audience is creatively invested, the separation between the artist and public starts to blur.

I’m not good at story telling and don’t function well in the linear way. My creative process is based around narrative and visual modules that I experiment with and connect in different ways. The Heart of Perspective, Making of the Film project is a result of such process, where all the drawings, animations, videos, storyboards etc. contribute to a larger whole.

CM: You mention cinema, and one thing that I think we have in common is definitely an interest in cinema. In terms of my own work the use of the large scale is cinematic. I want a cinematic impact from some of the work –to accentuate the use of iconic imagery.

DS: The title of the project refers to filmmaking. But the project will never reach the level of synthesis to become a conventional feature film. I think of it as a pseudo-film – something similar to an early phase of the film production; where we can sense the full potential of film’s multimedia layers, but where the connections are loose and allow for an interactive response.

The time component is interesting here. In the so-called time-based arts such as film or music, we are forced to see the work in a linear way. But in the 2D art, we are presented with everything at once. We still need time to observe the work, but we choose in which order to do it. I’d like to preserve this interactive aspect of 2D art in this pseudo-film. That’s why the animations are kept short. When you enter the gallery, your gaze travels around and you can choose to view the work in any order you like.

I ‘m curious about your drawings. I notice that you largely work in black and white.

CM: To complement the big paintings I was working on a few years ago I started to get more interested in space – in militarized space, or controlled space where people exist in extreme circumstances. Belfast under militarized circumstances produced liminal spaces  - spaces of absence and removal – both physical removal and incarceration and also the absence of aspirations, or the ability to transcend this environment. I wanted the work to relate to this sense of absence, so I stripped out the color to accentuate the white quality of the paper or canvas. My interest in the symbolic aspect of white – with ideas of purity, removal, etc. was key in shaping this body of work. On a purely aesthetic level I also get a lot of satisfaction from stark graphic imagery – black and white. Maybe it’s from growing up with comic books – black and white cinema, black and white photography, printmaking…

I produce a lot of drawings in particular, which brings up ideas related to the artist as a producer of images. A friend of mine recently brought up the idea of visual pollution - that at present we are absolutely drowning in a glut of images. This poses a question to us as producers of images. How do we argue the case for our own images – how do we give them weight and gravity, transcend, skirt or cut through the overwhelming volume of images that exist around us?

DS: It’s hard to imagine how people 300 years ago perceived paintings. Recently I’ve visited Venice. It was so interesting to see these well-known paintings in their original context. Back then this was the only way you could see a painting:  in a distance, behind altar, as part of the church architecture, only for a brief moment during the mass.

CM: Paintings in churches during this time had a tremendous power. They were very important in the manipulation of people’s thoughts and desires. There is the idea that today there are so many images that they have lost their power – but the power of images is paramount. In particular, if you look at how people choose to dress, the way they look, images are still key in creating and shaping desires. For those who argue that images have no power the situation of war is another example. Images of war are ubiquitous, but there are certain images of war that will never be shown in newspapers or on TV. In the media, images of death and mutilation are simply not shown. So images do retain this immense power. Political cartoons, pornography – images of the human body are still taboo and there are complex sets of taboos in place about presenting visual information.

DS: Because we are exposed to so many images, the direction of our gaze is not just defined by images themselves, but also in the way they relate to each other in the giant superstructure of mythology. This has a huge effect on the images we create ourselves. As a landscape painter responds to the landscape - we respond to the cultural landscape we’re living in. We don’t react to one image, but to a complicated sea of images and information. So we produce some kind of multidimensional mythological structures.

CM: The multi-dimensional power of images is important. I’ve always been drawn to artists who were visionaries, who really open up this power. For example in Cinema you have Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, filmmakers who create these incredibly rich visual tapestries.

DS: While the visual artists are pushed to the side to became critical and detached commentators, the cinema takes the center stage in contemporary culture. For example Kurosawa - he wasn’t just making critique of the post-war Japan in the 50s and 60s, he created his own rich mythologies.

CM: Kurosawa and Tarkovsky transcended the narrow agenda of the time and place in which they were working with the scope of their vision. You could argue that today the meta-narrative of the artist as visionary doesn’t exist any more – and there are plenty of artists who are not interested in this idea. Filmmakers like these two embraced broad overarching frameworks and big themes - from spirituality, to crisis, to the human condition  - epic human themes.

DS: I liked the way you used the word visionary. It’s a good word to describe a myth architect.

CM: Visionary can also apply to the details – the way Tarkovsky weaves in natural elements – the wind blowing grass and trees, or Kuroswa’s cloud scenes. That while they are not essential to driving the narrative, they broaden the scope of the vision of the film, adding to a richness of visual information. These days I don’t feel qualified to answer who would characterize as a visionary artist – Bela Tarr maybe.

DS: To go back to your work, do you think the mythologies it embodies change depending on the context it’s viewed in? For example, exhibiting in Croatia.

CM: It’s interesting to exhibit in Croatia in terms of some of the ideas we’ve been discussing. Also in terms of the shifts from communism to capitalism, or a one party state to a democracy. I’m from a supposedly democratic state (N. Ireland) and live in one (United States) yet there is a fine line between the supposedly democratic state and the police state. In particular in the UK, which is supposed to be a democracy, yet ran a police state in its own back yard (N. Ireland) openly and plain for all to see. The United States has many of the attributes of the police state. The US is also interesting in that its flexibility allows all resistance and protest to operate within the framework of democracy, and become subsumed into the broader fabric of the system. Your protest is democratically allowed – its part of the system – and is subsumed within the fabric of the system and therefore neutralized. You can register your opposition to the war, as it’s your right – but it doesn’t seriously threaten the system and the war goes on. So it’s a fluid system in that it contains and embraces its opposition – but neutralizes them.

DS: It’s interesting the way propaganda machine is always associated with communist states. The common perception here is that the U.S. is free of ideology and that everything is in some natural state of being. Actually post WW2 communist propaganda as manifested in posters, paintings, and big monuments etc. is quite naive. Those were all anachronistic art forms - more a symbol than really being able to manipulate the masses. Around the same time, in the West you have a very sophisticated propaganda of the Edward Bernays caliber. He was someone who was approaching and funding researchers to create scientific consensus to stimulate a social environment where certain commercial products would be needed. And if Bernays was working to produce these effects on us 100 years ago, you can only imagine the level of manipulation we’re exposed to nowadays.

It would be interesting to trace when art became politically engaged and adopted an anti-establishment stand.

CM: A lot of people trace it to Goya. Even though you have figures that were considered rebellious within the Renaissance – Caravaggio for example. The socially conscious artist has been around for the past 200 years, but has always been a minority figure, and yet has always had to rely on having their work made visible by the classes that they often criticize  - as the bourgeoisie have been the backbone of support for all artists.

It poses the question of the purpose of the work – what you want to have it achieve, what is the social function, the social value of art? This is a question that I’ve often grappled with. There is the idea that art cannot challenge the system, as contemporary art is a part of the system, and a product of it. In terms of commercial galleries art is viewed as luxury consumer goods. There are many models that resist this of course.  Challenging a social system through mainstream art venues neutralizes the power of the work as these venues represent the system being challenged in many cases. The truly radical artwork usually isn’t welcome in galleries and museums. I do still feel an affinity to Herbert Marcuse’s idea that while art cannot change the world; it can contribute to the thoughts and feelings of those who can.

DS: When I entered the graduate school in Ohio, I was very excited about the new cultural environment. The American art scene, especially in the Midwest is very different from Europe - you can do whatever you like and pursue your individual goals, free from institutions, trends, cliques, and other forms of cultural homogenization. But after spending two years there, I felt the lack of these despised institutions. Because in many ways, they represented society. And I need society. To me, art is not supposed to be an individualist pursuit that you do just to satisfy yourself, to “work on yourself”, to “realize yourself.” I feel that art is an essential part of the social fabric, and that what I do has to contribute to the whole.

CM. I agree, and feel that artist should be a public intellectual, and not a ruthless individualist – that in producing work in the public realm that the work should contribute to the broader culture. These days the role of the artist is multifarious, but one of the ideas about being an artist that I respond to, is that the work should pose questions or engage an audience. By that I don’t mean that artists should make work about certain topical issues, but I respond to a consciousness of the fact that this is social practice, for all its individualism – that there is a social dimension to being an artist.