ONE STEP FORWARDS, ONE FRAME BACKWARDS

Daniel Crooks’s Optical Allusions

George Alexander

While Daniel Crooks’s ‘timeslice’ digital videos break exciting new ground, they remind you that art is still a form of magic, a game of intricate enchantments. Perceptions of reality are drastically revised and the signatures of art history apparently misappropriated – Etienne-Jules Marey on elephant-tranquillisers ... Eadweard Muybridge in a ripple-tank ... cubism moon-walking backwards through Martin Plaza … Albert Einstein and Hunter S. Thompson in the same train compartment … Nude Centipede Descending a Staircase …

How does he do it? The technology is standard-issue software on personal computers but Crooks’s skill is such that you are taken into his world, a parallel galaxy with its own eerie, undulating lava-lamp physics that makes space swarm in the eyes, and time sing in the ears.

So much about the artist’s work nods to that early twentieth-century moment – especially in his use of trains and city streets – that was the noisy annunciation of modernism.(1) That era when matter was first read as energy and rigid bodies were elastically deformable. The spatialisation of the temporal dimension, as in the paintings and sculptures of Balla and Boccioni, was always seen as an intoxicating buzz: a way to smash objective time and bourgeois hierarchies of space.

Today, when digital technology can display footage across six channels, and seven cameras are used panoramically, your eyes are given a special treat. Digi-time deepens as well as lengthens, micro-perceptions come bubbling up unbidden, and things take on what animators like Chuck Jones would call ‘the art of post-retinal effects’. Jones noted that when a string of fifteen cars stop for a red light and the light changes, the fifteen cars don’t move off en bloc. Hence Rikki the Mongoose’s head must move part of the way before it can start dragging the shoulders, which then drags the torso, whence the tail snaps along afterwards. There is something of this stop-motion effect in Crooks’s works, where trains compress, disappear and reappear. Destination signs pixellate when you move. Someone’s polymer arms turn into very long chains of repeating units. Train tracks are extended and elasticised, then diced and sliced as if by strobing propeller blades and then break into framed sections that fill with inky shadow. Such sequences pay homage to old filmstrips with their sprocket holes, as well as to Tex Avery cartoons.

In Crooks’s new work the repeating carriages of different trains are stitched together, making one long train, while temporalities blend and un-blend as suburban thoroughfares seem to open fanwise, landscapes go through their own lurching system of motion, and nearby pliable buildings sweep up towards you on invisible swings.

One striking element in Daniel Crooks’s aesthetic is the tension between a stabilising urge (what he calls the ‘plane of cohesion’) with the pleasure of being cast adrift by time and space. In the new work Crooks has collected and filed his old ATM dockets and razor blades et cetera as a way of caching everyday life. Through a process of matching and (almost) repeating the shapes, the artist appears to bring these inanimate things to life. They become a form of self-portrait, a way of joining the dots on the borderland between animation and lifelessness. Along with the visual seduction, there is a kind of ‘voodoo’ that is always associated with new technological practices – the way they alter the world and your experience of it. Electricity, in the beginning, seemed spiritual. When the dead could return in old movies, albeit as images of flickering light, cinema seemed supernatural. Ever since the Lumiere Brothers ran a film backwards for the first time, everyone thought: if we could run time backwards like a film, could we make death reverse itself?

In the beautiful ‘imaginary objects’ series of stills, Daniel Crooks swaps the dimensional axes to form temporal structures, so that these vaguely familiar, half-real things are able to leave a photographic imprint. In the digital editing suite, Crooks makes duration and space utterly malleable.

Back on the street, in On Perspective and Motion, 2007, your eyes become louvres that open and shut. Stuff looks analytically discrete one moment, while the next it seems phenomenologically continuous. Pedestrians in Martin Place reduce to Giacometti thinness, then harden into a frieze of stone pillars. Walking gets broken down into segmented units and you can’t stay upright. Legs corrugate into warped gravity fields, and caterpillar away from you.

Daniel Crooks achieves what many artists have hoped to do: he makes matter itself magical, transporting you as if by some sleight of land, or train of cohesion, to another – newer, older, more astonishing – world.

George Alexander is Coordinator, Contemporary Programmes, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

(1) See the interdisciplinary study of these sweeping changes in The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 by Stephen Kern (Harvard University Press, 2003) on how art, technology and thought in these critical years dismantled our hidebound ways of experiencing time and space.