The Picture and the Step

Kirstie Skinner

 

The picture changes with every step you take.

Jan De Cock

 

Jan de Cock’s Denkmal 7, installed in the square next to the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, is a gleaming edifice of hidden surprises. Propelled by curiosity, visitors circumnavigate the bottom of the monumental construction, and gradually discover a structure that brilliantly undermines its own geometric logic. In its adherence to the straight line, the right angle, the grid, and its use of prefabricated fibreboard frames and panels, the 12mx12m ’monument’ adopts a formal language of systematic rigour. But its assembly of polished reds, greens, whites and natural tones is intuitive, improvised, complex.[1] On a bright morning in June, I peer at Denkmal 7 through apertures and gaps in the polished timber shell and find further layers and lattices of wood within, some illuminated by shafts of sun, others lurking in darkness. When I circle to see if there might be a way into the heart of this piece, I find what appears to be an opening in the side. But my way inward is barred. A woman sits behind a table placed in the opening, selling tickets which allow access to the Kunsthalle steps and an elevated walkway alongside the work, but not into the construction itself. Like a movie theatre or fairground attraction, Denkmal 7 appears to house a living custodian and a box office, yet access inside is refused. My initial expectation of an immersive experience is thus disappointed. Instead – to transpose the filmic analogy beyond the spatial confines of the cinema – I am offered a series of more voyeuristic and detached perspectives on the work, in the form of ‘long shots’ from each of the entrances to the square, ‘mid-shots’ sweeping up the sides of the construction, a series of ‘close-ups’ that pan across ’walls’ and past ’windows’, and, from the walkway, ‘aerial shots’.

 

On moving up the stairs adjacent to Denkmal 7 and reaching the walkway, the view opens out to reveal unanticipated clusters of white elements set in the ‘roof’. They make up a series of rooms that are open to the air and flooded with sunlight – emerging almost like contemporary ruins. This secret horizon tops a dramatically reversed view of the insides and outsides of the box. Wandering backwards and forwards along the walkway, all of the internal elements previously seen from the ground are glimpsed anew, defamiliarised, and dimmed in relation to the fresh context of the dazzling rooftop. Framed patches of cobblestone hover below. Standing on those cobbles moments ago, I had looked to where I now stand, and seen blue squares of sky. Sensing the simultaneity of these polar points of view is exhilarating and vertiginous. It reminds me of Paul Virilio’s observation on the moments following the moon landings, which afforded a “simultaneous view of the moon on the TV screen and through the window”. At that moment, Virilio contends, the body replaced the ground as the measure of the centre of the “living present”.[2] Thus one becomes more aware of one’s shifting position, one’s parabolic movements, and the time it takes to look. One has the uncanny sense of being observed in the process of observing. In many ways, De Cock’s puzzling structure is akin to Stanley Kubrick’s monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey (blank slabs that were either alien and sinister, or else ancient and obsolete – the uncertainty was essential). Although bearing some resemblance to human architecture, the true nature of Denkmal 7, like Kubrick’s monoliths,remains a matter of speculation. In the ’long shot’, Denkmal 7 occupies a central vantage point – it stands like an observation post, its colours and forms reflecting and echoing the bizarre concoction of architectural variety and history that surrounds it. One’s attention is relayed back and forth between De Cock’s sculpture and the 15th century red sandstone tower of Dom St Bartholomäus, the lofty windows of reconstructed medieval houses on Römerberg, the modular repetition of a high-rise retail and apartment development in moulded concrete, and the curved glass expanse of the Schirn Kunsthalle itself. In this context, Denkmal 7 reads like a misprision of human architecture – either denying the instrumentality of architecture and merely enjoying the play of light, volume and space, or else parodying the aspirations and aesthetics of modern architects and the administrators of heritage and culture.

 

Closing in on the sculpture, an alternating sequence of ‘mid-shots’ and ‘close-ups’ is set in train. The shifts in one’s attention – between the work and its surroundings, between inside and outside, between above and below – gradually reveal the sculpture’s elaborate combination of framed views, shadows, and reflections. With every stride, new vistas emerge through gaps in the structure, and hidden elements reveal themselves only to disappear again with the next step. Intermittent sunlight produces dark diagonal shadows that cut the smooth surfaces, creating bold repetitive patterns. Like a sundial, these shadows register the perpetual motion of sun and spectator, moving at different rates through time and space. Meanwhile, particularly when the sun shines, the polished fibreboard surfaces reflect the adjacent planes and panels inside the structure, as well as parts of surrounding buildings and bodies – almost transforming Denkmal 7 into a hall of mirrors. These parallax shifts that occur when moving along one of the work’s sides – as the gaps, shadows and reflections glide in and out of view – are so pronounced that the structure starts to look like a mechanism set in motion by unseen cogs. This recalls László Moholy-Nagy’s Light-Space Modulator from 1922-30, which consisted of opaque, transparent and cut-out components that revolved like a music box. Illuminated by a fixed electric light, the kinetic sculpture produced a graceful ballet of shadows and reflections. Denkmal 7 also ‘modulates’ space and light, but with a fixed structure of blocks, boxes, screens and lattices. Here, it is the spectator’s movement, combined with variations in the weather, which causes shadows and reflections to resolve and dissolve.

 

Moholy-Nagy’s work alluded both to historical magic lanterns and to the new technologies of film projection – indeed, in 1930 he made a film of his mechanism in action and titled it with a play on words, Motion picture black-white-gray. In 1946, Moholy-Nagy formulated his concept of ”vision in motion“, which explored the impact of locomotive technologies upon the visualisation of one’s surroundings: “[i]n our age of airplanes, architecture is viewed not only frontally and from the sides, but also from above – vision in motion […]. Architecture no longer appears static but, if we think in terms of airplanes and motor cars, architecture is linked with movement”.[3] For him and others of his generation, the shift in everyday visual experiences within a newly mechanised world would eventually change consciousness altogether: “[w]e are heading toward a kinetic, time-spatial existence; towards an awareness of the forces plus their relationships which define all life and of which we had no previous knowledge and for which we have as yet no exact terminology. The affirmation of all these space-time forces involves a re-orientation of all our faculties […]. Space-time stands for many things: relativity of motion and its measurement, integration, simultaneous grasp of the inside and the outside, revelation of structure instead of façade”.[4] He argued that the advent of film had anticipated the ‘vision in motion’ of a ‘motorised’ world, and that film, together with art, might play a crucial part in articulating and understanding his culture’s wider reorientation of perception.

 

Strikingly, most of Moholy-Nagy’s space-time criteria continue to be addressed in Denkmal 7.De Cock’s own marshalling of ‘vision in motion’ allied with his avowed fascination with early film and fundamental filmic concepts, suggests that it might be fruitful to keep Moholy-Nagy’s analysis in mind, and read De Cock’s allusions to film, not just as a way of looking, but as a “way of thinking”.[5] Neither artist is interested in simply emulating cinema – both the Light-Space Modulator and Denkmal 7 resist the two-dimensionality, verticality and fixed viewing position of cinematic projection. They are dizzyingly complex, labyrinthine, intersecting structures, whose shadows and reflections play across three dimensions, skidding across a variety of angled facets. Both artists, at different ends of the twentieth century, invite spectators to explore their own visual habits within cultures that are permeated by (albeit chronologically distinct) cinematic models of visuality.[6]

 

Paul Virilio recently traced some startling historical links between the invention of cinema and the advent of aviation (sequential photographer Jules-Etienne Marey was President of the French Société de Navigation Aérienne, for example) and concluded that “[t]here is an instructive coincidence between the parade of cinema sequences, the filmic weightlessness of the frame, and the invention of an aerial kinematic parade”.[7] With characteristic hyperbole, Virilio suggests that an intensification of this conjunction between twentieth century travel and the filmic moving image has taken place. He makes the claim that “spatial distance” has gradually given way to “temporal distance” alone, and that it is “no longer possible to distinguish […] the automotive from the audiovisual”.[8] He, and others like Jean Baudrillard, refer to the increasing virtuality of experience – for instance, in our interactions with people via the internet and in our absorption of visual information and entertainment via televisual and digital forms. Decades after Moholy-Nagy, De Cock faces a society that has become utterly inured to these virtual registers of experience, but which is still not necessarily conscious of their ‘weightlessness‘ on a daily basis. While De Cock’s constructions of open frames and solid screens advance a link between the forms of sculpture, architecture and film with the same succinctness as Moholy-Nagy, they make a much greater bodily demand on the spectator – who is visually lured, then physically rebuffed, aesthetically delighted, then spatially confused. De Cock’s sculptures challenge spectators to consider the impact of disembodied visual practices on how we negotiate (visualise) our physical interactions with the city, its buildings and its institutions.

 

Frame and Screen

In What is Cinema? André Bazin distinguishes between the picture frame and the filmic frame. A painting, he argues, is a microcosm of the world – its frame underlines the disjunction between the interior space of the painting and the natural continuous space of the real world. The filmic frame – which he would rather refer to as the edges of the screen – can be considered as a device for ‘cutting out’ a portion or section of reality: “The outer edges of the screen are not, as the technical jargon would seem to imply, the frame of the film image. They are the edges of a piece of masking that shows only a portion of reality. The picture frame polarizes space inwards. On the contrary, what the screen shows us seems to be part of something prolonged indefinitely into the universe. A frame is centripetal, the screen centrifugal”.[9] Although Bazin glosses the fact that the film image is as much a representation as the painted image, he demonstrates how the frame acts differently in establishing these two modes of representation-image. In his essay ‘The Frame of Representation and some of its Figures’, Louis Marin further complicates Bazin’s distinction. Painting is an example of what Marin calls “transitive representation” – representing something absent by substituting something present (as in the case of mimetic painting). Cinematic images on the other hand, are an example of “reflexive representation” – a performative act which displays or exhibits something that is already present. This act is achieved by pointing at the thing, or in the case of film, ‘framing it’. In painting, the frame simply reinforces the boundaries of the special representational space, whereas in the case of cinema, the representation would not exist without the frame.

 

In Denkmal 7, as in most of De Cock’s sculptures, there is a recurring motif – an open box form or module – that emulates the physical structure of a picture frame or window frame. These ‘frames’ afford either a surprising view of another part of the work, or a slice of the surrounding cityscape, sometimes both. The resulting views cannot be construed as a representation in the ‘transitive’ sense of painting but can certainly be characterised as a ’section’ of reality re-presented for contemplation – ie a ‘reflexive’ representation. This reflexive dimension is further underscored when one open box is lined with another, the outer box thus ‘framing’ the inner one. Describing the painting Gran Cairo (1962) by Frank Stella, Marin argues that a doubling of the frame can be used to bring the two forms of representation into conjunction: “if the frame is one of the means by which representation presents itself presenting something, Stella’s picture represents its own presentation. The painting is entirely reflexive; its transitive dimension consists of representing its reflexive dimension”, that is ”it facilitates the contemplation of representation as such”.[10] As with Stella’s paintings, the concentric effect of De Cock’s doubled frames draws attention to the act of framing. But this strategy acquires a further, more significant dimension, in that this framing is here inflected as ‘cinematic’ in character. At the end of each frame, luminous fragments of moving scenery appear. The dark depths of the frame somehow intensify the brightness of this ’image’, giving it the same hyperreal quality that characterises images generated by a camera obscura.

 

The ‘reflexive‘ character of De Cock’s work is extended further by the literal reflectivity of the sculptures’ surfaces. In the sporadic brightness of my morning visit to Denkmal 7, my attention regularly telescoped – like a movie camera’s focus pull – from what lay beyond the fibreboard structure, to what lay on the polished fibreboard surfaces, and back again; that is to say, from the myriad vistas framed by the open boxes, to the reflections that appeared upon the panels and box sides. The ’images‘ that dwell here are reproductions, as opposed to sections, of the surrounding environment. As such, they add yet another layer to the reading of the frame. In his essay ’The Narrativity of the Frame’, Wolfgang Kemp observes that “[s]ince the all-conquering appearance of film, the word ’frame‘ has two meanings. Its standard meaning is the frame around a picture, whereas in its new sense it means the picture itself, like the picture that, when projected as a whole succession of pictures, gives rise to film”.[11] The polished panels act as makeshift screens, and the shape of the reflected image is exactly circumscribed by the edges of its provisional ground. De Cock’s various facets allow one image to be seen while at the same time screening another from view, just as the cinema screen does. While the fragments of section-views seem somehow brighter for being isolated and viewed through deep frames or layers of panels, the images seen in reflection are defamiliarised by their new colouration and their borrowed shape and varied angle.

 

Movement

To take in the complex interplays between frames and screens, vistas and reflections, the viewer is compelled to move. In film, the moving ’point of view’ generates a particular set of psychological and perceptual effects. Rudolf Arnheim has noted how the impulse to move the film camera came early on in film history: “Mr M A Promio who toured Europe in 1896 with a new Lumière apparatus, as a camera reporter and projectionist combined in one person, writes: ’In Italy, it occurred to me for the first time to make travelling shots. After arriving in Venice, I took the boat from the station to my hotel. When I saw the buildings along the Canale Grande move by, I had the idea that the film camera, which could take pictures of moving things while it was standing still, perhaps could take immobile things while it was moving itself’”.[12] Thus for Arnheim, the ‘thoughts that made the picture move’ arose from a desire to ‘frame’ the perceptual experiences of locomotion. Gilles Deleuze concurs; in his study of the cinema as “movement–image” he makes the point that “the mobile camera is like a general equivalent of all the means of locomotion that it shows or that it makes use of – aeroplane, car, boat, bicycle, foot, metro”. “In other words”, he continues, ”the essence of the cinematographic movement-image lies in extracting from vehicles or moving bodies the movement which is their common substance, or extracting from movements the mobility which is their essence”.[13] This statement echoes Moholy-Nagy’s view of film as an articulation of ‘the vision in motion of a motorised world’.

 

Movement, we thus notice, is registered visually as perceptual displacement, and this can occur whether it is the viewer who is moving, or the thing he beholds. This equivalence is demonstrated by the confusing sensation of movement experienced by a stationary train passenger when an adjacent train moves off. The illusion of movement in these cases is dependent on the surrounding view being masked beyond the parameters of the carriage window, as a wider view would supply reference points clarifying what is moving in relation to what. The view of the moving camera also masks its wider surroundings (in particular its own means of locomotion) so the relative positioning of moving camera and moving subject is always in play, and close cropping can give rise to ambiguity. For Arnheim, “[t]he old effect, namely the moving landscape, is arrived at from an entirely new starting point, and in the process the principle of relativity, on which the effect is based, is formulated explicitly: in motion pictures, movement is not absolute but always related to the station point of the camera”.[14] A moving shot more closely resembles everyday vision than a static shot, certainly, but there is a distinction to be made between everyday vision facilitated by virtually unconscious head movement (vision which tends to be dispersed, sub-conscious, scanning, and only occasionally focussed on a task or an object), and the moving mechanical eye of the camera which consistently frames sections of scenes and requires us to focus intently on them. If the moving camera ever adopts the viewpoint of a particular character in narrative cinema for instance, it is usually at a moment of intense concentration – a moment of awe, fear or malice. In these instances, suspense usually arises from the gradual revelation of masked-off parts of the scene – thus the movement itself becomes very charged, and more emphatically noticeable.

 

De Cock’s frames are fixed, but even if the spectator stands still, the ‘shots’ they approximate are not like static establishing shots in film, where the movement of subjects within the frame is what matters. The views they generate are too narrowly framed for that, and might be better read as cut-away detail shots, which acquire logic only in sequence with other shots. In any case, the spectators are generally propelled around the walls of a De Cock Denkmal, and therefore the framed views tend to evolve and mutate in passing. When, as often happens, both the viewpoint and the framed scene are in motion (trees look particularly striking in this context), there is a strong visceral impression of the relativity and the simultaneity of multiple vectors of movement. This captivating effect recalls the distinctive dolly shots in Andrei Tarkovsky’s films in which the camera frame finds another framing device within the scene. A camera travels slowly past a window (such as the burnt out truck window in Stalker), or approaches and then passes through a door (like the back door of the childhood home in Mirror). Within the narrative context of these films, suspense is tinged with unspecified dread and/or wonder – such as one might feel in a dream. In the more open context in which a spectator navigates De Cock’s artworks, the purely formal aspects of such suspense come to the fore: it is the consistently fragmentary nature of these views that makes them intriguing. For the Romantics, the fragment stood for what could not be seen (what lay beyond the pictured window frame, or what the lone walker saw as he looked out across mountain tops). In a Romantic vein then, De Cock’s suspenseful structure is a device that illuminates snapshot details in order to draw attention to the wider frameworks of vision. Using filmic analogies to frame our movements, De Cock prompts us to reflect on the nature of mobility and perception, and their links with desire and knowledge.

 

Grids and Fragments

For the spectator exploring a work by de Cock, every individual ’take’ – or ’frame’ in Kemp’s sense – that is extracted from an evolving view (moving shot), or sequence of boxed views (cut-away details), is an arbitrary selection. In this sense, it is comparable to one section of a grid. Just as a grid is in theory infinitely extendible, so the world continuously moves and unfolds across time and space. The challenge of measuring such movement was taken up by Edweard Muybridge. In photographically deconstructing and reconstructing individual movements, Muybridge anticipated the fundamental language of film to come, and established the essential role that the grid would play in the design of the film strip. In Muybridge’s motion studies the grid provides the basis for analytical continuity, and thus legibility. Grid lines appear within each photograph (increments of movement are measurable from one image to the next) and the photographs are themselves shown in grid formation (individual moments of time are presented in sequence). The grid thus constitutes a ground upon which all human and animal movements may be compared, signalling Muybridge’s scientific intention. In contrast to this more analytical way of working, Muybridge took greater licence in arranging his sections of time and space in the earlier 360˚ panoramas of San Francisco. As Rebecca Solnit recounts, the photographic impressions taken from the top of Nob Hill took hours to make and they did not always appear in a correct temporal sequence in the final panorama: “Just as viewers are seeing in several directions at once, so they are looking at several different moments at once. Like a movie, the 1877 panorama was edited together out of many discontinuous pieces of time into a plausible but fictitious continuity”.[15]
 
De Cock has often made reference to the motion studies of Muybridge in interviews; and the grid form recurs throughout his sculptures. Open boxes and filled-in frames are frequently stacked in regular rectangular arrays. These grids might suggest an analytic apparatus, but the complexity of the construction as a whole soon undermines such a notion – the grids are often situated high up on a structure, or else blocked off by a solid panel directly behind them. De Cock is clearly not concerned with analytical logic, nor do his pieces aspire to a fictional continuity; instead he refers to his work as “film montage in space”.[16] For the early proponents of montage in the 1920s – filmmakers such as Eisenstein and Vertov – the arranging of elements was consciously manipulated in order to engender new insights through the antithesis and synthesis of images. In De Cock’s work, the viewer must create the montage as she or he moves around the work. The resulting juxtapositions and collisions of images cannot be willed or even anticipated by the artist. The experience of the work remains open-ended and provisional for each new spectator, though it will almost certainly consist of kaleidoscopic pseudo-images, and a degree of visual conflict and phenomenological confusion.
 
The screen and frame views in De Cock’s work in reality never appear in isolation, but are repeatedly brought into startling and confusing conjunctions. Multiple gaps alternately coincide and cancel each other out. Tiers of screens relay reflections, and occasionally, like periscopes, reflections of reflections. Alongside more regular gridded arrays, other frames and blocks are irregularly placed at different heights, sometimes penetrating walls and floors, creating cuts and disjunctions. Though the concept of the grid is invoked by De Cock through a geometric plan and modular construction, any overall grid plan that may have existed at the outset is no longer accessible to sight nor comprehension. It is precisely the resulting perceptual disorientation that is being re-presented or ‘pictured’ by De Cock’s sculptures. The lucid but disjunctive images they produce, exemplify how quickly the abstract rationalism attributed to the grid can be subverted by concrete variations of it. The visual contradictions generated by the work recall Nietzsche’s belief in a “radically different perspectivism” in which “different points of view are anything but complementary, each one manifesting a divergence”.[17] Nietzsche protested against the formal apparatus of classic perspectivism which guaranteed “the possibility of disengaging, of switching from one point of view to another”.[18] He objected to the idea that the world existed objectively, that different views of it must be consistent with each other and thus the whole might be reconstructed from any combination of angles. This amounts to an illusory abstraction, while disjunctive and disorienting images may give the viewer a glimpse of the ’polymorphic‘ or undifferentiated real (ie the real before the brain has ’ordered‘ it), exposing and disrupting the habitual imposition of perceptual order that Nietzsche mistrusted.
 
In one of the early scenes of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, a feeling of disorientation is established when both the camera (which has adopted the protagonist’s point of view) and the various doors in the hotel entrance, lobby and lift are set in motion, all at once. The reflective expanses of glass and sliding chrome doors cause successive displacements in their surroundings that make the scene difficult to decipher. This scene recalls another in Murnau’s The Last Laugh, where a camera (which has been mounted on a bicycle) enters a lift, and descends into the entrance hall of a grand hotel. As it travels, Gilles Deleuze remarks in Cinema 1, the camera performs “constant decompositions and recompositions”.[19] “By producing in this way a mobile section of movements”, Deleuze continues, “the shot is not content to express the duration of a whole which changes, but constantly puts bodies, parts, aspects, dimensions, distances and respective positions of the bodies which make up the set in the image into variation”.[20] If Muybridgean motion studies depict ’the duration of the whole which changes’, De Cock’s Denkmal 7 by contrast, puts ’bodies, parts, aspects, dimensions, distances and respective positions of bodies‘ into endless variation, and productively disrupts the more habitual consumption of images where difficulty or inconsistency is filtered out and/or repressed.
 
Robert Smithson wrote in the unpublished article ’Art Through The Camera’s Eye’ (circa 1971) about the opposed poles of nature and abstraction. For Smithson, abstraction referred to the “grids and geometries” that humans impose on nature in order to flee or to flout what terrifies them.[21] He felt the “neutral” eye of the camera might allow artists to synthesise these oppositions – to see them together ‘in the same take’, as it were: “The buried cities of Yucatan are heterogeneous time capsules, full of lost abstractions and broken frameworks. There the wilderness and the city intermingle, nature spills into the abstract frames, the containing narrative of an entire civilisation breaks apart to form another kind of order. A film is capable of picking up the pieces”.[22] Smithson suggested that artists in the 1960s sought to ‘frame’ abstract cultural frames, to make these frames visible, and at the same time problematise faith in them as abstractions by replaying them within the transient and arbitrary frames of cinematic film.
 
De Cock offers a similarly self-conscious framing of contemporary cultural frames in an artistic practice that acknowledges the increased ubiquity of film and virtuality since Smithson’s era. In the case of Denkmal 7, what we might call the ’grids and geometries’ of film itself, as well as the architecture of a particular site, are conceptually echoed, literally framed and thus sculpturally highlighted. De Cock’s futuristic ruin is a mise-en-scène that stages the disjunctive and transient nature of perception and makes it visible. Our current culture’s abstractions and frameworks emerge – partially excavated – in the splintered views and kaleidoscopic reflections playing across the surfaces of the dazzling monolith.
 
 
 

  • Notes
  • [1] De Cock’s various Denkmäler thus recall two divergent art historical models: the two-dimensional side views resemble the abstract compositions of Piet Mondrian, while the three-dimensional serial components invoke the systematic industrial progressions of Donald Judd. References to Mondrian’s universalist modernist vision are thus brought into productive tension with Judd’s intent focus on the here and now: 1920s Neo-Platonism and ‘spirit’ vie with 1960s Pragmatism and the concrete ‘object’.
  • [2] Paul Virilio, Polar Inertia (trans. Patrick Camiller), London: Sage, 2000, p. 72.
  • [3] László Moholy Nagy, ‘Space-Time Problems’, in Richard Kostelanetz (ed), Esthetics Contemporary, Buffalo NY: Prometheus Books, 1989, p. 69.
  • [4] Moholy Nagy, ‘Space-Time Problems’, p. 73.
  • [5] Chris Dercon, ‘A Completely Different Idea, Elsewhere’, in Jan De Cock. Denkmal ISBN 9080842419, Brussel: Atelier Jan De Cock, 2004, p. 65.
  • [6] Ian Chambers explains how a cinematic model might come to determine aspects of visuality more broadly: “As a language, as an economic and cultural institution, a way of picturing and enframing the world, cinema contributes to the making of the visualscapes, soundscapes and culturalscapes in which we move […]. This perhaps suggests that we should […] consider cinema as one of the languages we inhabit, dwell in, and in which we, our histories, cultures and identities are constituted[...]. Languages, whether literary, cinematic, musical or verbal, and even if often dependent upon quite precise techno-cultural systems, are not turned on and off by the flick of a switch. They persist and permeate our world. They ghost our presence and circulate beyond our individual volition. As part and parcel of the ecology of our lives, they exist prior to our knowing and this informs our being and becoming. They are irreducible to a medium or technology. They are part of our understanding”. See Iain Chambers, ‘Maps, Movies, Music and Memory’, in David B Clarke (ed), The Cinematic City, New York: Routledge, 1997, pp. 230-231.
  • [7] Virilio, Polar Inertia, p. 27.
  • [8] Virilio, Polar Inertia, pp. 20-21.
  • [9] André Bazin, What is Cinema? (trans. Hugh Gray), Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967, p.166.
  • [10] Bazin, What is Cinema?, p. 82 and p. 93.
  • [11] Wolfgang Kemp, ‘The Narrativity of the Frame’, in Paul Duro (ed), Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 11.
  • [12] Rudolf Arnheim, ‘The Thoughts That Made the Picture Move’ (1933), in Film as Art, London: Faber, 1958, pp. 138-139.
  • [13] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam), London: Athlone Press, 1986, pp. 22-23.
  • [14] Arnheim, ‘The Thoughts That Made the Picture Move’, pp. 138-139.
  • [15] Rebecca Solnit, Motion Studies: Time, Space and Edweard Muybridge, London: Bloomsbury, 2003, p. 161.
  • [16] Jan de Cock in conversation with Monica Amor, Wouter Davidts, Kirstie Skinner, John Welchman and Jon Wood at Tate Modern, London, Friday 1st July 2005.
  • [17] Solnit, Motion Studies, p. 161.
  • [18] Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective (trans. John Goodman), Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1994, pp 46-47.
  • [19] Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 22.
  • [20] Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 22.
  • [21] Robert Smithson, ‘Art Through The Camera’s Eye’, in Jack Flam (ed), Robert Smithson: Collected Writings, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996, p. 374.
  • [22] Smithson, ‘Art Through The Camera’s Eye’, p. 375.