All the drowning
people
Jean-Jacques
Passera
•
Drive.
•
Where?
The meagerness of
the American vocabulary creates a free semantic field, sometimes clever and
artistic, and which artists are wont to use for its infinite expression: adding
up meanings.
“Drive” is such
an example:
drive ride in a car a path to a mansion
an avenue to an
estate a
golf stroke a thrust command
transmission a disk drive
a herd of cattle
a tape drive if it’s a verb: to
go for a drive to
turn
Jordan Crandall
constructs Drive in this fragment-linking spirit. The work consists of 7
tracks whose associations or visual contrasts lead us to a polysemous ensemble
of images and sounds. The numerous entry levels enable each viewer to project
personal interests, paths, and even impotency. These entries are those of the
image’s aesthetic attraction, body representation, nudity, the magic of
scientific images…
Moreover,
Crandall cultivates a relationship with the film industry. He calls on a film
crew, technicians, and actors. He uses film tools: montage, shots against
shots, characters in crossed motion, frame sequences. Bits of landscapes,
objects and bodies are heaped up. These images are broken, constructions that
have been machine modeled, contrast effects, information conglomerates,
overwhelming particles.
Track 7 seems to
contain the essence of Drive. An actress is alone onscreen, delivering
her lines to a man that isn’t there. Using effects of form and tone, the
actress plays opposite her partner, dialoguing with him, but a play of exchange
and identity permutation is set up by the nature of the content of each
person’s lines. This is all about identification, territory, vulnerability,
protection, and mastery. The vocabulary is taken from the sphere of video war
games, from war and love affairs.
Track
1. I see a man running fast in a series of hallways or city streets. I see him
again a few seconds later, running in slow motion, inside a room, I see him in
a counter-elevated shot, I see the soles of his feet in close-up, I myself am
that electronic eye, that motion detector. Superimposed on his body is a test
card or target, displaying indecipherable data. I am the analyst of this body.
Relationships between modeling systems, between high-tech performance and body
representation, are at the core of Crandall’s work. We are faced with the
multi-use of advanced image-capture systems: analytic data, visual signaling,
artificial intelligence. It has to do with image technology, observation
systems, arms, transitional objects, communication tools: film, video,
nocturnal visions, portable cameras, infrared cameras, thermal cameras.
In
track 6, on two or three screens, some images are taken from the military, from
manufacturers of observational and analytic apparatus, but these images have
been reworked. Their pixel format has been magnified, exploding onscreen in
digital flesh. The images have been amputated from their original meaning, and
edited in fast sequences. A dialogue is set up between images and databases.
The image is instrumentalized, and therefore blurred. Machine takes on body.
Quite sophisticated and sometimes fascinating tools peer into our bodies,
inside and outside, scrutinizing our movements, analyzing our traits. In this
way, data is captured and compared to the base. We’ve gotten to the point of
being watched, observed from all sides, constantly, from above, from cities,
from streets. Cameras, microphones and scanners keep an eye on our actions,
they follow us, they witness us, they listen to us. They name us.
In track 3’s long
program, a woman is pushed down and shaken by a man, she is locked inside an
apartment, she tries to make a phone call. Crandall puts in visual signs and
sound signs like players in a breathless narrative, a taut thriller. These
signs are made more complex and more sensitive through a two-fold process:
caricature and decontextualization of the images. In the frame of action, of
body and muscle work, of their movements, the images get stamped with data,
with systems of capture and analysis, with forms, speeds, directions. Some of
the scenes are enacted in an extremely personal fashion. Graphics and data are
shown as superimposed images. They distance the subjects, and keep us hovering
between the general and the particular, not letting us figure out where we
stand. The speed, generated by the montage and the rhythm breaks, is
established in order to propel us from intimacy to dispersal, from depth to
loss. We too are subjects.
Crandall’s
work has a strong and carnal erotic charge, holding the spectator in a sensual
grip of images. This is precisely what happens in tracks 3 and 4. But it is not
merely such eroticism that stems from the representation of stripped bodies or
of their gestures. A self-erotic system is created, through the plastic nature
of the images, through their sequencing, through the sounds that are used, but
also from Crandall’s immense talent for filming: landscapes, objects, crowds,
bodies. A tiny spot on skin is matched against a tiny dot from the electronic
viewfinder. Jordan Crandall often uses close-up shots. These are close-ups of
recurring elements: eyes, feet, lips, hands, fingers, forefinger, grasping
electronic or mechanical objects. The use of fragments means the disappearance
of the body unit, and thus of identity. The electronic viewfinder shows us and
confronts us with the body’s infinite geography, the immense landscape. There
is a constant shock of images, not just through illustrating violence, but also
passions. Body and machine break down in a series of choreographed and rhythmic
fragments that combine the slowing down and speeding up of an ambulatory
camera. It is a striking and poetic blend of versatile images, of shocks,
bodies against tools, tools against bodies, [joules].
Humans are
subordinate to the self-surveillance program they’ve implemented: key words,
methods for analyzing morphological formats, social formats, ergonomics,
listening in. The world seems to be in the sweep of these systems for flagging
and monitoring individuals and objects. The machine has turned into an
apparatus that clothes the human body, it taxonomies us, we can’t shake it off.
Nothing is left, nothing.
Track 2 involves Drive’s
database. Crowds of people sliding. Speed is connected to surface, it is
emphasized here. What emerges from the masses of humans and the allure of
cities? The plastic grip of the images is fascinating. Since the crowd is not
in focus, we are forced to look at these images as though at a body, a body in
close-up. We are made to take a good look, to try and find something
recognizable. We must name the fragments we have isolated and then
reconstructed, as fast as the images speeding past. Indeed, from our
standpoint, we analyze as well. We scan the shapes in order to find, as
beforehand or else afterwards, unknown shadows. Amidst all the drowning people,
I try recognize a stray shape that might have something to say, despite the
racing stream of images. The private realm is made to resist the public realm.
The bolt of the
front door can’t withstand a perpendicular thrust of over 80kg force.
The military planes hunt down the target in a three-dimensional ballet,
missiles explode, helicopters crash. This stunning output of shapes, motions,
colors and sounds, chases us. This concentration of dull light, of infinite
spaces that we try to fathom on our own. It all seems at once central and
mysterious, emotional, soothing.
Blind, silent
thought, a physical visionary work that makes it hard to comment. Non, je ne
me souviens plus du nom des balles perdues*
Jean-Jacques
Passera
2001
Translated by
Natalie Lithwick
* “I no longer
remember the name of those stray bullets / of those long gone dances.” A
wordplay in French on balles perdues, from the Bourvil song: C’était bien (Au
petit bal perdu) Robert Nyel / Gaby
Verlor, Editions Bagatelle 1961. N.T.