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September 21, 2005
Choosing ways to see
Parts of Bill Viola's 1985 statement made me think of Rudolf Laban's work in Laban Movement Analysis, and in particular the concept of Space Effort, which seems very relevant to the week's theme of Point Of View. Laban, with the help of his students and collaborators, created a system to try and categorize the different ways in which humans move their physical bodies. The part of this system that examines the quality of a movement is called Effort, and within Effort is a subcategory that deals specifically with the quality of movement in regards to its relationship to Space. This subcategory has two contrasting elements of Effort: direct and indirect. Not only does Effort apply to movements of arms, hands and legs, but also to our eyes. It asks the question, how are we choosing to see? With direct spatial effort or indirect spatial effort? It is a physical choice, not just a matter of mental interpretation.
In our society, and perhaps in particular in a place of compressed learning like ITP, our common tendency is to focus hard, to actively investigate, to seek out answers, or probe for specifics. This is direct, and it is almost a one way street. The main force of our interaction is outward. Indirect spatial effort, however, is very different. It is adjusting your point of view to encompass the bigger picture. Not just conceptually, but physically allowing your gaze to take in everything that you can see, neither focussing on any one thing more than the other, nor allowing your gaze to blur or "space out". This is a more receptive mode. This is less about trying to actively shape your experience of what is around you with your mind's attempts to build on what you already know, and more about allowing your experience to be shaped by the space of a larger reality.
"So field perception is the awareness for sensing of an entire space at once. It is based on a passive, receptive position..." - Bill Viola
In my experience a way into this, that helps bypass the mind, is a physical choice.
On a different note, I was interested to read Viola describe video work as time-based art. I guess I had a conception in my mind of true time-based art being work that is ephemeral in its material nature. It may be durational, or it may not, but most importantly it changes over time and eventually dies. Video, although it needs some time to watch it (especially in the case of artists such as James Benning), has been taken out of time because it has been recorded. It can be watched over and over again; it is never live, and that recording will never evolve as the minutes, days or years pass by. In relation to this, video art rarely touches me deeply, because it can only offer a mediated experience, as opposed to the work of someone like James Turrell, which offers us a live relationship to our peculiar human concepts of 'space' and of 'time', and no moment of that experience can ever be repeated.
Posted by Ed Purver's ITP Blog at September 21, 2005 11:45 PM