MMVBREAKLESS SESSIONS

Shaun Gladwell: Beating a path, an enactment
Ihor Holubizky

‘Beating a path’ is a commonly used phrase in the English-speaking world, and does not require the implicit completion, ‘to your door’. That is to say, if you have a great idea, the world will …

The literal reading in Shaun Gladwell’s work is present as enactment – some works are paths of travel – and inherent, as a governing principle or conceptual model: the idea. In the everyday world, where ideas generate profit, ‘beating a path’ is an axiom of entrepreneurs and business. Ideas are also a gold standard in the art world, yet the phrase is not used, and actualisation alone can be dismissed as ‘mere’ facility or technique.

The social–cultural aspects of Gladwell’s work have been written about: street and sub culture; aberrant versus conventional (social) behaviour; architectural space; interventions; reactions; and perceptions. All have value and merit, and are there for the taking. The path phrase is explored here in the context of an historical vanguard, in the formation of a film language and then in the formation of a video language. Gladwell has a strong grasp and understanding of visual languages that include painting – what works for him and what does not. We don’t see the latter because, as martial artist Bruce Lee asserted, ‘discard what is not useful’.

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In her landmark 1962 book, The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863–1922, Camilla Gray wrote about the film, Drama in Cabaret No. 13, made in 1913–14 by a group of the Moscow-based futurists:

This was simply a record of their everyday behaviour, strolling in and out of shops and restaurants in brilliant coloured waistcoats, the men wearing earrings and with radishes or spoons in their buttonholes ... a parody of the Symbolists with their cultivation of the exquisite. By ... bringing the language ... ‘down to reality’ – out into the street, into the everyday life of the common citizen – these artists sought ... the reconciliation of art and the society which had dismissed art to its ivory tower.

Gray’s description can easily fold into Gladwell’s video, Hikaru Carpark Sequence, 2001. The camera follows Hikaru Iano as he rides and performs on his BMX in Sydney, at one point entering a McDonald’s and doing ‘his thing’. No one reacts. A path is ‘beaten’ and the actions are an enactment, a sequence of events, rather than a re-enactment or contrived narrative. The obvious distinction between Drama in Cabaret No. 13 and Gladwell’s work is their respective technology and tools: the commonality is the need to formulate a visual language. In 1913, film was a young medium without conventions that could be strategically inflected, simulated or parodied, although a healthy sense of the absurd was in play. The Moscow group was working and creating in the unknown, at a time when painting was still the dominant visual language in art. Included in the group were the brothers David and Vladimir Burliuk, who continued to paint: Vladimir died in 1917; David in 1967.

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Vancouver 1970: twenty-four-year-old artist Christos Dikeakos faces the camera and says, ‘Going for a car ride? Shall we go?’ He’s in, takes control of the camera, and we’re off. The video beats a path along the industrial streetscape of False Creek and Terminal Avenue to the western suburbs. It is not tourist-scenic, but what Dikeakos described later as, ‘opening up to the possibilities and experience of the socio-economic and physical geographic space of a soft industrial area attached to a young metropolis’. Our eye drifts through the jittery video eye: nothing happens except ... time and space. Dikeakos titled his work car rides/street scans: the street can always be driven along; can always be scanned. It will be different moment to moment, week to week. It can be viewed again and again: it should be. There is structure and composition. New things and nuances will be revealed, as long as we are prepared to receive them.

Gladwell has done his roadwork too: a skateboard-eye view of traffic markings in Line Work: A Road Movie, 2003; and he has ‘drifted’ on the spot against a grey-sky backdrop in Storm Sequence, 2000. The difference is in production values. Dikeakos’s state-of-the-art portapack was a heavy, clunky thing compared to digital camcorders, yet both offer possibilities. The portapack was a revolution for artists in 1970, to script with no narrative, to shoot from the hip, produce and distribute by themselves (and often ‘for’ themselves). Creating a language was a necessity because (among other things) video was a new and hybrid medium, a continuous analogue electrical signal that – unlike film – recorded sound simultaneously on the same medium. The digital camcorder is a second-generation revolution, with ultra-portability and accessibility, and a radically different editing system. The ingredient of enactment, however, is not exhausted. A digital camcorder requires diligence and thought because the trigger is so touch-sensitive. (Why is a blank canvas charged with possibilities while video, before shooting, merely ‘blank tape’?)

Gladwell’s Multiple Descent (Taranaki), 2004, follows two skateboarder descents in a waterfront-parking garage in New Plymouth, the same path but a different beat-and-view from that of the garage users. There is beauty in this path. Gladwell’s job is to find it and provide us the enactment. In doing so, he continues to develop a language. Post-production is kept to the essentials, as simple as slow motion. Rather than trying to deceive, the objective is to engage the eye and mind.

Gladwell can be in front of the camera – as in Storm Sequence – or behind it, as in Hikaru Carpark Sequence and Multiple Descents (Taranaki). Everything you see is what is there, like WYSIWYG, an early computer acronym to describe the direct relationship between what is on screen and the final output: What You See Is What You Get. Not surprisingly, there is a WYSIWYG Hypothesis (Simon Free @ http://wysiwyg.stanford.edu/):

First Postulate: Experience is the only reality for an observer.
Second Postulate: There is no reality other than experience.

This, too, is a connective tissue in the arc from Drama in Cabaret No. 13 to Dikeakos to Gladwell, a transparency and democratisation. In (Marshall) McLuhanesque terms, the medium is a message, if not ‘the’ message. The cynical academic will contest the terms ‘reality’ and ‘experience’, and the WYSIWYG postulates as feeble, but when was the last time you saw a good film or video made by an academic, cynical or otherwise? (An exception is McLuhan’s 1969 film, Picnic in Space, where he is both on camera and ‘directing’, through voiceovers and visual inventions.)

It is possible that Gladwell, one day, will decide not to use street culture for his enactments, and find another path: the Burliuk brothers embraced film only once; Dikeakos made only one video. As I write, Gladwell is facing the problem of shooting video from a Kawasaki motorcycle riding through 10 kilometres of the Yokohama Bay tunnel. In solving the problem, video will continue to ‘do work’ for him. In casual conversation (never so casual as to be a throwaway), Gladwell spoke of fast light in the context of a senior painter’s work, not as preference but as idea and his observations. He understands the values of light, the transcendence of daylight, the impact of under-lighting and, as noted, a social currency (the Enlightenment). Gladwell’s ideas have a truth to them, without the overlay of a strategised agenda or misuse of fashion. American painter John Singer Sargent would have been untruthful in his portrait of Paris socialite Madame Gautreau, Madame X, 1884, had he ‘dressed her down’. To state the obvious, Sargent’s painting has survived the fashion of the day.

Ihor Holubizky

Ihor Holubizky is a Brisbane-based essayist and art historian.