Editing a multi-channel video and sound installation for a gallery exhibition presents a unique set of challenges technically and creatively. Doing it in collaboration with an iconic figure in the art world with whom I’d never previously worked (or even met until shortly before work began) was a challenge of a different sort, and an exhilarating one.
The project is called Psalm 29(30) and is the work of Dara Birnbaum, an artist who has been creating videos and video installations focused largely on mass media – television through the internet – since the 1970s. This project explores the extremity of war and healing in a very subtle meditative way that as I understood in my early conversations with Dara, was conceived out of a traumatic period in her own life. Understanding and honoring her very personal vision for the work became the primary responsibility and it was important to carry the weight of that every step of the way.
The idea was to use very serene, very beautiful images of the Lake Como landscape (shot at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center some years ago) set against appropriated footage of the civil war in Syria. Dara challenged ourselves to present the footage of war without it becoming a spectacle – different from the media presentation we’ve been tuned to, so that the effect would be a reflection of a lost landscape (her words). For me this was about understanding her visual sensibilities and also, learning what did and did not feel true to the idea, which largely dealt with screening and editing footage rife with violence. Elements of that spectacle can be strangely seductive and needed to be resisted – other subtler images found to illuminate feeling we wanted.
The fact that it’s a walk-through installation with 5 screens positioned around a center chamber housing the sixth, was a technical and an esthetic conundrum – how to balance the alternately independent and synchronous nature of what was happening on each screen in a way that would resonate emotionally with the soundscape that was being developed (by Neil Benezra in parallel with the visuals), and ultimately by people moving through the space. The 5 screens on the perimeter all held sequences of Lake Como at different times of day that were sequentially interrupted by images of destruction that either began or resolved in the sequence running inside the chamber which was fully dedicated to the war imagery. This required developing a system to position all the sequences on one screen in my cutting room in a way that (crudely) mimicked the orientation of each screen within the geography of the gallery space. The hope was that the interruptions would create not only an emotional reaction but also a sense of movement that would pull you through the physical space toward the entrance of the chamber.
With much experimentation, and course reversals in picture and sound, this very collaborative process between Dara, Neil and myself was completed in April and was exhibited at the Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris from April through June of 2016. Interestingly, having been unable to travel to Paris in that time, I have still not seen the work in the manner it was meant to be experienced (and is impossible to duplicate in the walk through video produced at the gallery and linked to below), so until it has the hoped for opening in NY, I’m still imagining it.
Click here for a video taste of the gallery installation.