Reconnoiter
2000-2008
Fifteen pigmented ink jet prints
One Leporello (artists book)
Prints variable to 40 x 60 inches 101.6 x 152.4 cm
Leporello 10x160 inches 25.4 x 406.4 cm
Editions of five
Prints:
Leporello:
Reconnoiter
Detail of Leporello (artists book) 2000-2003, 10 x 160 inches / 25.4 x
406.4 cm
Proposal for Vevey FESTIVAL IMAGES ’04:
To produce an exhibition of the series RECONNOITER in a gallery
location
and large scale outdoor locations throughout the town of Vevey. Switzerland
The images that compose the series Reconnoiter
are super-enlarged microscopic details of film stills from Klute, an
American detective film made in 1971. Completely abstract the works depict both
serene fields of rich color and hotly charged compositions evoking a
psychological landscape. I titled this series Reconnoiter after
spotting the word in a 12th century love poem written by the
Troubadours that describes the meeting of the eyes: “that it is through the
eyes that love attains the heart”. However, the word connotes a military
context of reconnaissance and espionage. In the English language reconnoiter
literally means “to survey” as in “to scout” describing my process of surveying
the film stills and super-enlarging the fragments to produce the series.
As Klute is both a crime story
and a love story a duality is established between malevolent and caressing
gazes upon the same woman. The film thoroughly explores the erotic gaze in its
tender and sinister aspects. This duality of erotic looking and erotic
experience is explored visually in Reconnoiter. Compositions range from serene and
enveloping to jarring and violent.
Georges Bataille in his book Erotism: Death and Sensuality
describes a division between what he calls continuity and discontinuity of
being. According to Bataille our mortality renders our existence finite or
‘discontinuous’. It is only during the fleeting moment of sexual ecstasy that a
continuity of being, relieved of the body and the biological drive to carry on
the species, can be grasped. It is in this exquisite moment we are united with
our ultimate creative potential, our destiny and the destiny of the world. The
erotic moment is the ecstatic moment.
Reconnoiter looks again,
looks deeper into a film and its narrative, deeper into our primitive and
volatile urges, granting them a voice through the sense of sight alone. It is
after all “through the eyes that love attains the heart” and it is through the
eyes that erotic desire is ignited. And it is through the smallest cells in our
bodies (like fragments of films) that broadest desire of our being is relieved.
Ecstasy.
I propose to the Vevey Festival
Images ’04 an indoor exhibition of the complete series of fifteen digital c
prints (101.6 x 152.4 cm) and an outdoor exhibition of the images on
billboards. Scale is very important in this proposal. As the images themselves
are derived from the smallest fragment of a film still on a computer screen, it
would be only fitting to return it to the cinema-sized scale of a billboard.
Also the translation of these images from the secluded intimacy of the gallery
to an element in the landscape demonstrates and satisfies the project’s desire
to speak of the private erotic act as a manifestation of the ecstatic sublime.