Richard Billingham – People, Places, Animals

ACCA is showing a retrospective of the work of British artist Richard Billingham titled, People, Places, Animals. Billingham was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2001 and is best known for his photographs and videos of his alcoholic father Ray. Some of this work, including images from the series Ray’s a Laugh is exhibited here alongside his latest work Zoo, which features animals in captivity.

The work on animals is the first thing you encounter when you enter the gallery, and its an uncomfortable but absorbing experience. One of Billingham’s strengths both in this work and in the images of his family is his ability to present his subject matter with a compassionate and non-judgemental eye. His view isn’t detached, its clear Billingham loves animals and is sympathetic to the conditions they are kept in, but neither does the work hammer the viewer over the head with a message. His shots sometimes emphasise the animals captivity through tight framing, most strikingly in the video of a tapir, where only one close up eye and a foot is visible. In other videos he frames so that people visiting the zoo also appear in the frame.

While parallels can be drawn between this work and his early family work, particularly when they are shown together, the work doesn’t require this connection.

Amid all this emotion, the piece I found most engaging was a video work that in this context served as a sort of breather between the animals and people. Lasting for about fifteen minutes it is possibly constructed from a sequence of still images, put together to create movement much like stop motion animation. I don’t know if the day for night effect is the product of the old film stock Billingham often uses or a deliberate underexposure, but the resulting deep blues and blacks create a mysterious moody effect. The movement is hypnotic, the whole forest seeming to rotate around. I could imagine this piece as a four rather than one channel installation, allowing the viewer to be completely surrounded by forest.

Memories of Imagined Landscapes

This afternoon one of the book grocer’s intelligent regulars engaged me in an interesting conversation about John Banville’s book Prague Pictures – a city Banville has only visited briefly. This got me thinking about the work I’ve done about the desert – a landscape that for me is entirely imaginary and cinematic. I find it fascinating that imagined spaces can exert an emotional pull as strong, and in some cases even stronger than the places one has lived for many years. And I don’t think a cinematic experience of space is any less physical in the way it infects our memories and evokes a sensory response.

When you watch a film, the events and landscapes become your own memories. In many cases I have a sensory memory of a moment in a film, but no memory of the cinema where I saw it, no recollection of whether I was hungry, cold, tired or when it was. Yet I can recall the feeling of the objects in the scene, the smell of the space, the landscape, the sounds. At times I will recall a place that has the feeling of a memory, but then realise I’ve never been there, only experienced it through film.

In Bladerunner, Rachel, the highly advanced replicant is devastated when she discovers what she believes are her memories are only a collection of stock photographs and stories given to all the replicants. It calls into question the idea of ones past being made up of ones ‘real’ experiences, and shows how our imaginary memories can be as important in marking who we are.

The Problems of Filming Painting

The appearance of Julian Schnabel’s latest has prompted thoughts of his first film, Basquiat and the problems of films about painters. There have of course been many films made about painters, some based on real painters, and others entirely fictional. In many ways the painter is the perfect subject for a film, particularly if their painting style is large and active (like Jackson Pollock) and their lives chaotic or filled with trauma (like Frida Kahlo). The desire to make something is a wonderful motivation for a character, and the paintings themselves often serve as a template for the look of the film. The Girl with A Pearl Earring attempted to reconstruct the light and composition of Vermeer. In Frida, Julie Taymor inserts slightly surreal moments where Kahlo’s paintings are animated, thus rendering the surrealist sensibilities of Kahlo’s work in a filmic way.

While creating a story out of the life of a painter can work in much the same way as any life story, the depiction of the painter’s creative process is much more difficult. An interesting example of the capturing of the process of painting on film is Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse. Based loosely on a short story by Balzac, it is unique in the way it explores the time it takes to paint. The full cut of the film runs for about four hours, most of which takes place in the studio while the painter Frenhofer draws Marianne in preparation for making a painting. The concentration on the action of work means that in watching the film the audience experiences a time that mirrors the time felt by the artist and model. It is a time of slow and careful observation, rather than the contracted, action based time usual to film. Shots of Frenhofer’s hands drawing are intercut with shots of Marianne, so that the audience shares in the act of looking and drawing.

The lengthy time that it takes to make a painting is in many ways the antithesis of the way time appears in film, and a slow exploration of the creation of a painting doesn’t initially seem that conducive to sitting and watching. But the space allows Rivette to develop the characters in subtle ways that then have an impact on the painting. Added to this is the process of filming – apparently Rivette shot sequentially, and what was filmed each day was based on what was filmed the previous day. Thus the slow construction of the film happened in a similar way to the construction of a painting.