SUBCINEMA Melbourne screening 18 December 2017

SUBCINEMA

Steven Ball

8pm 18 December 2017

Artists Film Workshop

Arena Project Space

2 Kerr Street

Fitzroy 3065

Australia

Screening Notes

Steven Ball has been working in audio-visual media since the early 1980s. In the late 1980s he accidentally migrated to Melbourne, Australia, where he continued his practice making a number of film, video and sound and installation works, as well as engaging in various curatorial, administrative, teaching and writing activities, the most significant of which was several year’s deep involvement with the Melbourne Super 8 Film Group. He returned to the UK in 2000, and since 2003 has been Research Fellow in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, where he has been instrumental in establishing the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection.

Since returning to the UK his projects have included Deep Water Web, an audio-visual installation and online collaborative work with John Conomos at Furtherfield Gallery, London (2016); Film of the Same Name (video, 2015) with Philip Sanderson; Concrete Heart Land (video, 2014) with Rastko Novakovic; the screening exhibition Figuring Landscapes, which toured the UK and Australia (artist and co-curator 2008-2010). His publications include ‘Expanded Cinema: Art Performance Film’, Tate Publishing, (co-editor and author, 2011) and writing for journals such as Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ) and Senses of Cinema.

Most recently he has concentrated on music projects, as a member of Storm Bugs (post-punk DIY outfit since 1978) with Philip Sanderson recently releasing ‘Certified Original and Vintage Fakes’ (CD and download, Snatch Tapes, 2017), and his new solo album 'subsongs.' (CD and download, Linear Obsessional Recordings, 2017), which has been described by Radio Free Midwich as “The missing link between reductionist improv and the intimate breathy song cycles of a Robert Wyatt.”

This screening brings together a selection of film and video works made over a span of some twenty years. The work covers a range of territory and approaches, in particular concerning spatiality and landscape in Australia, the UK, and elsewhere, often through the filter of his relationship to what might be thought of as a post-colonial position. The works integrate structural and materialist techniques, they are variously essayistic, experimental, rhythmically abstracted, and occasionally immersive.

Programme

Periscope 180°
(super 8, 17 min, Australia, 1992)

The title indicates the scopic and conceptual topography of the film. The film starts in Fremantle, West Australia, with nautical references (seascapes, masts, lighthouses). The second part moves in East Gippsland, Victoria, alternating indistinct images of beach, sea and sky with black and white footage of fishermen on a beach. Taking up notions from Deleuze & Guattarian deterritorialisation, and including lines taken from Stanley Kramer's 1959 film On the Beach, the voice over narration resounds with ironical autobiographical suggestiveness, “...he’s English and he’s here on some scientific job, or was it geographic? What does he do exactly?”, becoming a poetic speculation on the uncertainty of migration towards a nomadic condition of continual departure and the paradox of return: the refrain. The third and final part in aerial transit, an arrival denied by the film's ending.

The Ground, the Sky, and the Island
(digital video, 8 min, UK, 2008)

This video reworks photographs, super 8 film, sound and anecdotal text from a series of bush and outback locations across Australia during the 1990s. It takes the form of extracts from an imagined first-person journal, layered over extruded experiments with composition and movement constructing a synthetic shifting landscape. Moving through discrete but related sections, the abstracted view shifts vertically through 90°, between the closeness of the local, the ground, and the claustrophobia of the distant colonizing horizon. As it travels east from the South Australian desert, through bush, tablelands and rocky range, the video becomes a subjective essayistic meditation, in absentia, on being in the landscape, the problem of attempting to reproduce these landscapes and the uncertainty of their representation. At its inconclusion we arrive on K'gari (Fraser Island off the coast of Queensland) where we reach the edge of the known world, a space being made in an open future.

However, the Autodidact
(super 8, 17 min, Australia, 1994)

frame enlargements by Arthur Cantril

From my small back room in Elwood in 1994, with super 8 camera taking revenge on the helicopters which I was convinced might have been spying on me; not paranoid, just healthy suspiciousness. The film was then reshot through several generations of just out-of-date super 8 film given to me by Marie Craven. The variations of grain and colour determined by the stock, which included Kodachrome, Agfa Moviechrome, and Ektachome. I devised an editing structure determined by the ideas that perception of the 'present moment' lasts for around three seconds as theorised in The Dimension of the Present Moment by Miroslav Holub. The soundtrack is constructed using a similar schema, made entirely of extracts from quarter-inch tapes found in a second-hand shop, included a teach-yourself-French tape, which inspired the title.

The Defenestrascope
(digital video, 6 min, UK, 2003)

Throwing the view through windows from monumental towers in contemporary medieval European city and town. This eccentric exploration of urbanised space revolves around a setting of the traditional 16th century Norfolk song Go from the Window. The melody reconstructed from an ensemble of samples from a variety of sources, determined the choice of a series of views from 'the window' and elsewhere. Framed by a fragmented clapping rhyme it echoes Music Hall and anthropological folk recordings in a neo-rococo vaudevillian romp for the surveillance age.

Aboriginal Myths of South London
(digital video, 10 min, UK, 2010)

Aboriginal Myths of South London adapts world views associated with indigenous people of Oceania to an interpretation of the space and social history of places in South London. As the first manifestation of the project, this video is presented as its prelude and explores New Kent Road, a major road close to the artist’s home. This application of attitudes to the status of the dead and human relationship to the ground, becomes a materialist alternative to the concept of the genius loci and the familiar. The approach is measured and austere, employing an arrangement of animated photographs and voice texts that becomes a poetic essay.

Harmonic Three Three
(super 8, 23 min, Australia, 1991)

frame enlargement by Arthur Cantrill

The originating super 8 film was shot on Fraser Island off the coast of Queensland. The relatively firm sand of the beach provides one of the main roads on the island as the interior tracks become unpassable due to the loose sand. As we drove north up the eastern side of the Island we came across the rusting hulk of a ship wreck; one of the more accessible of many such wrecks dotted around the Australian coastline. The former luxury New Zealand trans-Tasman liner Maheno was sold to Japan for scrap metal. On July 9th, 1935, while being towed north by the Oonah, it hit unseasonal cyclonic conditions off Fraser Island. The tow rope snapped and it was driven ashore on the 19th July. It remains there to this day, slowly disintegrating in the salty tropical sea water. I reshot subsequent generations of the film on super 8, off the screen, concentrating on the abstraction afforded by the increasing graininess and contrast of each generation, concerned with the grain, the light, or lack of it, and the degradation of visual information. Much of the film is dark, unreadable, ghostly, shadowy. Occasionally orange light bursts through the silhouetted contrasty skeletal image of the wreck. I used all of the film shot in the re-re-re-reshooting in the final version, which results in long dark sections throughout the film. The experience of watching the film is dense, intense, quite dramatic. This is in part due to the dark ambience of the soundtrack, which was composed entirely from a recording of waves on a beach, slowed to a fraction of its original speed, employing varispeed manipulation, delay and phase effects, which were all improvised ‘live' to tape while watching the film.

81 mins total

Subsongs by subsong: Passing Place of the Seat

In which I write about the songs on the subsongs album, in order, song by subsong.

The denial of food and drink to a traveller would have been a rare occurrence. The breaching of that code of hospitality brought an uncanny revenge on the women of Allt Beithe township on the coast south of Tarbert. The day was in July, 'a blazing hot summer's day', and a man came down the hill to a house in which the women only were. He stood at the door and said: 'I've been walking since yesterday morning. I've had nothing to eat and nothing to drink. Give me a drink of milk.' The head woman of the house replied: 'We can't give you anything. Go to the burn and take a drink out of that.' - 'Yes' he said, 'is that so?' He stepped into the house and put his hand under his oxter where there was a small leather pouch, and he pulled a hazel twig out of the pouch and began stabbing at the thatch of the ceiling with it. And all the time he was doing that the women could not stop dancing, and he carried on without stopping until they all fell down exhausted. He put the twig back into the little pouch, and he said to them: 'The next time a man comes to this house for a drink of milk, you'll give it to him.' With that, he 'disappeared over to Skipness'. His name was MacFarlane, and he belonged to that family in Tarbert which was distinguished by its reputation for sorcery.  

Kintyre, the Hidden Past, Angus Martin, The Grimsay Press, 1984

Traditionally the dominant land use in the area is sheep grazing on the rough open hill-land.Increasingly, due to the favourably high rainfall and low land prices, commercial tiorestation hasspread and covers more than 50% of the project area. The woodland is densely planted conifer, whichrestricts physical access to some areas. 

The Knapdale area is underlain by metamorphic rocks of the Dalradian Supergroup, a Late Precambrian to possible Cambrian shelf-sediment and turbidite assemblage. This succession accumulated during the progressive rifting and deepening of extensional basins. The older Appin Group rocks, which do not outcrop in the Kintyre Peninsula, comprise quartzite-shale-limestone sequences laid down in a shallow-water shelf environment.

A suite of metabasic sills (formerly termed ‘epidiorite’) is intercalated within the upper Argyll Group metasedimentary succession in the south Knapdale area. These rocks are predominantly dark, fine grained and massive, although both foliated and coarse-grained varieties are found locally. The sills, which vary in thickness from 0.5 to 250m, are mostly concordant but are frequently disrupted bylater, north-west faulting. In areas of relatively shallow dip they occupy broad, elevated areas withgood exposure. 

Gold mineralisation in the Dalradian rocks of Knapdale-Kintyre, south-west Highlands, Scotland, A. G. Gunn, M. H. Shaw, K. E. Rollin and M. T. Styles, British Geological Survey, Department of Trade and Industry, 1996

Following a visit to Kintyre in Scotland, I was interested in new approaches to writing landscape which might consider it in materialist rather than romantic terms. It seemed to me that all or any of the aspects of a landscape contribute to its constitution. In human terms this particular area of Scotland is marked by waves of migration bringing with them different agricultural, fishing, religious, and cultural practices, languages, and so on. In particular the Irish, the Gaelic language, travellers, the ‘Coasters’ who withdrew from society and lived by the coast, but also, the sheep, the goats, rabbits and other wildlife. 

Landscape as a form is conventionally marked by human occupation and activity, becoming a record of that activity, framing views of the place, making some claim to it. Landscape frequently describes its human history, while the romanticism of the awe-inspiring, the sublime, offers a way for human contemplation to contain what is beyond itself, but is ultimately, like ‘nature', inevitably a human invention. But of course it’s not just a human or even animal space, it’s geological, it’s as old as the hills, the mountains, the valleys, the lakes, beyond the timespan of human lifetimes and cultures. 

This song was an attempt then to integrate the human in the form of elements of the myths and stories, which had been formed within and by this place, with the geophysical descriptions, and to invoke them on equal semiotic terms.  While the song restricts itself mainly to the mythical and geophysical, it might offer a proposition which suggests a continuum of description so as to not discriminate against or privilege any aspect of what makes up ‘landscape’, and perhaps could be applied to any other represented form or subject.

Some of the geological names were particularly delicious to sing "the metamorphic rocks... the turbidite assemblage", set in a backing track of sustained guitar drone loops.

Listen to the song and read the lyrics.

Subsongs by subsong: Subsongs

In which I write about the songs on the subsongs album, in order, song by subsong.

intense concentration at the ArtsCafé, photo: Richard Sanderson

Subsongs, the album, seems to me, after the fact, to be thematically disjointed, lacking any real conceptual underpinning. But that’s OK. The ‘subsongs’ suggested by the title, draw on something of a miscellany of subjects preoccupying my reading and interests during the more than a year over which it was written and recorded. The title of the album was always going to be ‘Subsongs’, after the song ‘subsong’, and while that song played with reflexivity, it didn’t propose a processual or conceptual grounding which could be applied to the rest of the collection of songs as a miscellany. Can miscellaneousness effectively be a unifying factor?

As the last song to be written for the album Subsongs took the role of title song away from ‘subsong’, but more than that, in the face of the aforementioned lack of conceptual or thematic unity, ‘Subsongs’ was written as a a song about the album, its subject is the songs alongside which it has its own place, in its own words “situated somewhere almost in the middle, like a progress report in a formless lyric”. It refers to some, if not all, of the songs on the album, for instance "landscape, myth, material, the present situation, other times, other places, other persons beyond the sixth extinction”, and I'll leave the dedicated reader with too much time on her hands, to work out which songs are referred to, one has to maintain some mystery!

The song acknowledges the nature of where songs are, subsongs in the air and on the page, and the more metaphysical question of what a song is, which is to say if it can’t be described, it doesn’t exist, and vice versa, because songs, these songs at least, are, if nothing else, descriptive. Arguably any text, even the most fanciful and imaginative, is a description of something, even if that something has no basis in any kind of reality, it has a basis in that text, which brings it into existence, which is to say brings the thing brought into existence, because if it couldn’t be described, it wouldn’t exist. This is to describe song-writing as world-making, metaphysics as the creation of a reality system, technic as cosmogony, metaphysics as the creation of a reality system.

Musically the song consists of guitar, bass and drum loops over which I recorded my vocal and improvised piano flourishes.

Like the song 'Inside', it had not initially made the first cut of the record, but also like that song I decided to reinstate it after its enthusiastic reception at the Linear Obsessional ArtsCafé gig. There I played it accompanying myself only bass, creating the looping pattern with a looper pedal.


Listen to the song and read the lyrics.