Embrace #2 (Greer and Max, Bernal Hill), single channel video, duration: 20:09 min., 2010.
I am standing on a hill, my eyes are closed, my arms are tight around his waist. I feel his heart beating against my cheek, his arms resting on my back. It feels like an eternity. I cannot tell now how long it has been.
It is a constant hic et nunc. Jetziet.
Embrace #2 seeks to open up to the oppositions between labour and leisure, presence and absence, structure and contingency, and the fugitive and the eternal. My aim is not to play these binaries off against one another, but to move constantly between them, and find what lies at the heart of the system between photography, cinema and subjectivity.
On a trip to the United States in September 2010, I started filming a series of video portraits, which I’ve now titled Embrace. The premise for this series was that I would shoot two people in an embrace for an extended period of time, perhaps 10 minutes or so. It was important that the embrace was outside, rather than a studio, which had been the location for previous video works I had made. Time was highly controlled in the studio and there was always ‘limited time’, a kind of pressure to ‘get in – shoot – and get out.’ There is no sense of the flow of time in the studio, no sky, no sun, no light to suggest time or it’s passing, it is a non-place. It was also important that it took place during a kind of ‘free-time’, where one does not have commitments or deadlines. Of travelling, Italian poet Cesare Pavese says:
‘Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.’
It is in this realm of ‘essential things’ that I created the first videos in the Embrace series. I shot Embrace #2 (Greer and Max, Bernal Hill) (2010) on the evening before I was to fly home. I decided to use my friend Max whom I had been travelling with for the past couple of weeks. He even suggested that it be him. It felt right. He is taller than me, and his physical presence is strong. He was like an anchor. Roland Barthes characterises the embrace as an experience where ‘everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled.’# In this description, Barthes seems to echo Pavese’s account of travelling, in the sense that the suspension of time tends towards what I imagine of the eternal. Embrace #2 at times could be mistaken for a still image. That was one of my intentions, to make a work that is at once both cinema and photography and indeed, something else all together. For me, the concept of a long embrace has come to mark an analogy of the desire for a temporal experience where the present is heightened; the long embrace is the desire for Jetztzeit*.
Artist Statement
My artistic practise explores the dialectical relationship between cinema and photography, and the liminal space that exists between the still and moving image. My video works display a tendency towards stillness, both in terms of subject matter and the aesthetics of the camera shot and are intended to serve as laments towards the unfinished project of Modernity but also exist as separate durational meditations on time, space and subjectivity. My research considers video as a photographic medium, through an investigation of the photographic foundations of cinema and as a means to understand the experience of being in time.
