Sunday, April 28, 2013

Hiraki Sawa's "Lineament" at James Cohan Gallery



This post is belated (from the Ball State University Field Trip at the end of March) but important nonetheless. Hiraki Sawa's Lineament is the artwork that made me want to learn video (not even Christian Marclay's The Clock has done that).  Hello one of this summer's many activities that I must accomplish.



From the James Cohan Gallery Press Release:

"Lineament is a two-channel video installation in which a male protagonist navigates a white apartment. Like the intricate clock-like mechanisms that appear before and around him, his memories unravel and snap back together. The grooves of an LP record uncoil to become a line, then travel around in this liberated but perhaps indecipherable form. The audio— performed by Dale Berning & Ute Kanngiesser— is a palindrome, with a modified turntable in the gallery space playing a record forward and then backwards."



"In his catalogue essay “The Line Describes a Circle,” Tom Morton writes that 'in common usage, the English word ‘lineament’ refers to a line that describes an object, often a human face or body. In its more specific geological usage, however, it refers to a topographical feature on the surface of the earth that indicates an underlying fault. Lineament is a film about what happens to an individual when his internal narrative is erased. At first glance, the boy appears unchanged by his sudden bout of amnesia, but surely, his outer contours betray a subcutaneous breach.'”




 Still images via the James Cohan Gallery website.



and a small video clip via the iPhone.

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