Double Exposures: Performance As Photography, Photography As Performance (Intellect Books - Intellect Live) - Hardcover

Vason, Manuel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1783204095 ISBN 13: 9781783204090

Verlag: Intellect Books, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

A new collaborative venture between Manuel Vason and forty of the most visually arresting artists working with performance in the United Kingdom, Double Exposures brings together newly commissioned images and essays to explore new ways of bridging performance and photography. Ten years after Vason’s first book, Exposures, this ambitious project draws into sharp focus the body, the diptych, documentation, the photobook, identity, mediation, collaborative practices, and the relationship between photography and performance. With essays by leading critics, academics, and practitioners, this collection solidifies Vason’s centrality to the photography of performance.

 

Copublished with the Live Art Development Agency (LADA).

 

 

Published with the support of Arts Council England.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Manuel Vason is a photographer and performance artist. His previous books include Exposures and Oh Lover Boy. David Evans is a research fellow attached to the new History and Theory of Photography Research Centre, Birkbeck University of London.

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Double Exposures

Performance as Photography Photography as Performance

By Manuel Vason, David Evans

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2015 the individual contributors
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78320-409-0

Contents

INTRODUCTION DAVID EVANS, 7, 
DOUBLE EXPOSURES MANUEL VASON IN DIALOGUE WITH HELENA BLAKER, 11, 
MANUEL VASON - FRAMING LIVE ART LOIS KEIDAN, 17, 
PERFORMANCE, PHOTOGRAPHY, COLLABORATION, REVISITED: A HISTORY OF MANUEL VASON DOMINIC JOHNSON, 21, 
PAST - PRESENT - FUTURE ALICE MAUDE-ROXBY, 31, 
MERELY A STAIN IN THE PICTURE? CHRISTOPHER TOWNSEND, 35, 
DOUBLED UP: THE ART OF THE BODY DAVID BATE, 39, 
PERFORMATIVE CONCEPTUALISM: DOUBLE SENSE, DOUBLE FRACTURE, DOUBLE VIEW ADRIEN SINA, 42, 
THE LIFE-MAKING POWER OF PHOTOGRAPHY JOANNA ZYLINSKA, 48, 
DOUBLE EXPOSURES, 52, 
REVERSING THE GAZE, 54, 
DOUBLE IMAGES, 96, 
PARTISTS' NOTES, 139, 
BEHIND THE SCENES, 151, 
BIOGRAPHIES, 165, 
100 EXPOSURES, 177, 
AFTER DOUBLE EXPOSURES, 192, 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, 195, 

CHAPTER 1

DOUBLE EXPOSURES: MANUEL VASON IN DIALOGUE WITH HELENA BLAKER

Helena Blaker: You have described Double Exposures as 'an opportunity [...] through dialogue and exchange to test some things out, to establish certain things that were not clear, and also to open up to a lot of different inputs.' What are you referring to? Is this about your system of collaboration or about the photographic image?

Manuel Vason: I felt the need to create images that were less 'photographic' and more 'critical'. I felt the aspiration to change my relationship with the medium. I felt the desire to sabotage my photography and my role as photographer. But I think a work is strong when there is a necessity behind it, and for me the necessity here was the struggle inherent in the meaning of the word 'collaboration'. I was 'collaborating' with artists prepared to take any sort of risk, to put in question their autobiographical material and subvert every convention; for years I was holding on to the fact that I was producing high quality images and fulfilling a role as skilful image-maker. Now 'collaboration' was about giving the control away, re-setting my expectations, exchanging rules and roles.

I felt I had to make a gesture against the canonical and I came up with the idea of splitting the image. This split has an incredible power of connecting, separating and generating a gap. So Double Exposures is an opportunity to propose the diptych as the most truthful way of representing performance ... the gap generates confusion and the forced comparison of the two images activates the viewer. Each interpretation is more personal and in constant discussion. The movement between the images subverts the fixity of its reading. The entire process feels closer to the live performance.

HB: It seems there is always a very clear structure to the work you make with your collaborators, and you can see this in how the artists were brought together for Double Exposures. It's an incredibly systematic approach, where artists you have worked with before suggest other artists for you to work with now on an exchange of gazes, and members of the community around you also suggest connections with other, younger artists. It is as if the connections within this area fan out in an organic field like a natural organism, which has its own integrity.

MV: That's beautiful, because I find this idea of the organism very appropriate. When I thought of the title Double Exposures, I thought of Actions of Exchange as a subtitle. I could push it further and say that all the images in this book are 'conversations'. All my best ideas come out of dialogue, they take shape only when I need to imagine or explain them, and dialogue helps me to force them out.

I think the agent behind this project is an idea of 'contamination'. I see contamination as a positive virus or as an intra-pollination between artists. I have used photography as an excuse to be in close contact with these incredible artists. These artists have contaminated my view and have influenced my ideas, my practice and my understanding of what art is. I share with them a real need to celebrate diversity and I live for the illusion of being able to contaminate the viewers through the work produced. This mutual contamination is building a real family. Where else would I find 40 artists prepared to put so much time and input into an experiment? This is a real gesture of exchange. Can you imagine 40 painters all working on the same canvas?

HB: So you are driven by a constant enquiry about methodology as well as being inspired by this community of artists. Could you talk me through some of your previous projects?

MV: It was really difficult to get accepted into the world of performance art with a camera around my neck. A few of the artists I worked with had been deceived by photographers who had used their images without permission, publishing them in the wrong context and making a profit selling prints. Many of the artists had a real issue against any form of documentation and conceptually they were embracing ephemerality in opposition to consumerism and mainstream gallery business, so it was not a choice to build a transparent methodology but a real obligation.

In Exposures (1999-2001) the methodology was driven by photographic instruments. I was using an 8" x 10" plate camera and Polaroid film, and the 19 collaborators, who were all live artists, were asked to perform their actions for the static camera in exchange for an immediate result. Through dialogue, we reached the photographic result and approved it with the minimum amount of attempts. The unprecedented collaborative nature of the process led me/us to split the copyright of the images produced.

In Oh Lover Boy! (2000-02) I worked with a single artist, Franko B, for two years to become more intimate with his work and discover different ways to interpret /translate/document the same work into photographic images. Then for Encounters (2003-07) I invited 52 artists whose work had had a big impact on me through their live performances to collaborate on producing a 'symbolic' image, a site-specific action for camera. In contrast to Exposures, these images in most cases represented actions never performed in front of a live audience, so Encounters was the only medium for accessing the work.

In Still Image Moving (2012) I collaborated with passersby in the streets of Bristol to transform a particular message into an action to be photographed and projected large onto key buildings in the city. In Still Movíl (2010-13) I collaborated with 45 choreographers in South America towards the creation of a photographic image that would stand as a piece of dance in its own right, or a photographic 'score'. During this project I was introduced to the concept of improvisation, and for the first time I was asked to use my body and perform under instruction.

HB: The body is central to your image-making. What is the body? What does the body mean to you?

MV: In the body I see the primal material that associates me with others. I have always been caught by the idea of identification – who you are, what you have been, what you want to be. It's like a drive. It's an engine of research. It can be internal, this research, and it can also be externalized and projected, but it is very much an expression of correspondence, of relationship.

So when I think of the body, automatically I...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Intellect Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783204095
• ISBN 13: 9781783204090
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 199
• Herausgeber: Evans David
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland