{"id":1007,"date":"2023-02-03T21:45:46","date_gmt":"2023-02-03T21:45:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jondavies.ca\/?page_id=1007"},"modified":"2023-02-03T21:45:46","modified_gmt":"2023-02-03T21:45:46","slug":"under-the-microscope","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jondavies.ca\/?page_id=1007","title":{"rendered":"Under the Microscope"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pleasure Dome – Blurb<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Program Notes:<\/p>\n

Under the Microscope<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chop Off<\/em>, M.M. Serra (in person), 2008, 6 min. video USA<\/p>\n

Faceless Things<\/em>, Kim Kyung-Mook, 2005, 65 min. video South Korea<\/p>\n

Sick Film<\/em>, Martin Creed, 2006, 20 min. video UK<\/p>\n

Brain Surgeon<\/em>, \u00d6mer Ali Kazma, 2007, 15 min. video Turkey<\/p>\n

Magnetic Movie<\/em>, Semiconductor, 2007, 5 min. video UK<\/p>\n

\u201cI am human, let nothing human be foreign to me\u201d \u2013 de Montaigne<\/p>\n

How do I convince you that this isn\u2019t just a selection of gross-out tapes? Not that there\u2019s anything wrong with that. I don\u2019t want to dismiss the intoxicating allure of sights that should by all account repel and repulse us, but you have to agree that cinematic shock and prurience has a bad reputation. What does it mean to embrace images of real puking, shitting, cut-open bodies, to willingly go online or to the local underground cinema to witness extreme gestures and acts with enthusiastic gusto?<\/p>\n

Not for the faint of heart, this international video program offers unsettling scenes of reality\u2019s surface opened up for all to see. The bodies and objects \u2013 sometimes the same thing – in these tapes are under the microscope, stripped bare and exposed to the penetrating gaze of the camera, which is uniquely capable of bringing us viewers into harrowing, stomach-turning situations that we might otherwise never lay eyes on. Through looking with an unwavering \u2013 even mechanical \u2013 eye at extreme states, these tapes pervert the disembodied and authoritative gaze of science, redirecting it towards more deviant and less instrumentalized forms of spectatorship that do not offer the acquisition of knowledge as an alibi for looking. They suggest that being an unmitigated voyeur might be a more honest, embodied and thus empathetic way of learning about our fellow creatures and our world than to be a detached expert watching in order to simply gather evidence.<\/p>\n

We see recognizable human forms and psychologies up on screen here, but in states of extremis, and we react with disgust or pleasure \u2013 a thrill. Our own bodies \u2013 let\u2019s assume that they are safe and sound at the moment \u2013 seem to be reacting on a base, visceral level to the bodies in crisis on display in all their abject glory. They are like threats made to our bodily integrity and dignity \u2013 warnings that this can happen to you, whether against your will or with your full consent.<\/p>\n

In M.M. Serra\u2019s visceral and dizzying new video portrait,\u00a0Chop Off<\/em>, a man enthusiastically discusses the ins and outs of his extreme body modification practice, taking us through the squeamish yet methodical process of severing his joints one at a time. Fully engaged, Serra\u2019s empathy for her subject is total and so we are incapable of dismissing or rejecting him, instead feeling each chop as if it we had inflicted it on ourselves. (I dare you to try not to feel a tingle in your fingers.) She contextualizes his \u201cart of amputation\u201d within the history of corporeal spectacles such as freak shows, while drawing attention to the power dynamics between human oddity and spectator.<\/p>\n

The young queer South Korean director Kim Kyung-Mook\u2019s\u00a0Faceless Things\u00a0<\/em>is a disturbing low-budget feature structurally divided into only three scenes, each rigorously shot in a single take, which makes the slow-burning tension sometimes overwhelming. In fact, the feature\u2019s underground origins and the tone of menace it creates gives one the impression that literally anything \u2013 no matter how unspeakable – could unfurl in front of our eyes. The first and longest sequence is filmed with an unwavering, surveillance-style camera, recording a disturbing hotel room tryst between a large and domineering married man and a teenage boy. The second episode takes place in a claustrophobic bedroom, and is recorded in grainy video. It features a graphic scat interlude between the director \u2013 whose face is mostly off-camera – and a masked male partner that gets interrupted by an animated fantasia. The film ends with an enigmatic confessional coda by the director, making the work a fascinating, disconcerting examination of psychosexual alienation and self-exposure.<\/p>\n

Sick Film<\/em>\u00a0is British artist Martin Creed\u2019s structuralist document of the vomiting styles of the British. One after another, each identically-framed subject wanders out onto the pristine white soundstage and lets loose everything they hold inside (some requiring more effort than others). Presented in ascending order according to the volume of matter expelled, we begin with dribbles, drool and retching and end with a copious quantity of barf that boggles the mind \u2013 and guts. A metaphor for raw and unprocessed self-exposure, the vomiting on display also seems to reveal something of the subjectivities of its producers. Here Creed takes an act of extreme abjection and revels in the personal idiosyncrasies that emerge when each Technicolor torrent is choreographed against a neutral background for a steady camera.<\/p>\n

Capturing the real with vivid accuracy, Turkish artist \u00d6mer Ali Kazma\u2019s\u00a0Brain Surgeon\u00a0<\/em>depicts in graphic detail the eponymous craftsman at work on a woman\u2019s brain, refusing to allow us to look away and focusing on the precise actions of the man and his tools. The video provokes that particular kind of nausea that comes from seeing a sensitive, fragile organ \u2013 in this case the very cradle of our being – exposed to the world, so vulnerable now that it\u2019s removed from the protection of its sturdy enclosure. The video is part of a larger series that casts a mechanically detached gaze on different forms of labour, from clock maker to animal slaughterer.<\/p>\n

Magnetic Movie<\/em> by British science geek duo Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) might seem out of place in this blood-and-guts program, and certainly there is no human body \u2013 traumatized or otherwise \u2013 in sight here. Using the near-infinite capabilities of digital animation, it gives sumptuous visual form to the invisible magnetic fields constantly pulsating all around us, here in the labs at NASA\u2019s Space Sciences Laboratories at UC Berkeley. The phenomena described by space scientists are illustrated with jittery colour lines and bouncing dots. Here it is not human bodies that are laid bare by the cinema but the very forces that govern the universe, and knowledge is gleaned perhaps paradoxically through acts of imagination. Semiconductor\u2019s imaging software bridges the gap between the material and the intangible, and we must make the leap of faith with them into this speculative world.\u00a0 \u2013 Jon Davies<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pleasure Dome – Blurb Program Notes: Under the Microscope Chop Off, M.M. Serra (in person), 2008, 6 min. video USA Faceless Things, Kim Kyung-Mook, 2005, 65 min. video South Korea Sick Film, Martin Creed, 2006, 20 min. video UK Brain Surgeon, \u00d6mer Ali Kazma, 2007, 15 min. video Turkey Magnetic Movie, Semiconductor, 2007, 5 min. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1007","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jondavies.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jondavies.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jondavies.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jondavies.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jondavies.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1007"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jondavies.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1012,"href":"https:\/\/jondavies.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1007\/revisions\/1012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jondavies.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}