Subdued, corporate, beautiful, agreeable.

Bill Viola has the reputation to make a piece of video art for installation in a historic space like St. Paul’s Cathedral. Both Martyrs and Mary fit the space, the iconography and imagery are appropriate. The steel construction that houses the screens adds weight, anchoring them in the space, the arrangement of three and four vertical screens references the towering height of the space and the windows.

The beautifully photographed imagery often has a painterly quality, especially in Martyrs, to me it looks like a painting that was already in the space has been given life.

By treading similar ground to other religious artworks that were already in St. Paul’s I was left wondering why they were necessary. St. Paul’s is already a beautiful, contemplative space, I’m not sure how these works enhanced that. This left me contemplating another aspect of the works instead, the corporate collaborations. On the information board about the work it is made clear that the steel structure housing the work was designed with Foster and Partners. Bill Viola, St. Paul’s Cathedral and Foster and Partners all have international reputations, it was the nature of how this collaboration came about that I spent my time with the work deliberating. This high production value made it difficult for me to not draw parallels with the worlds of advertising and music video, with moving billboards on bus stops and lifestyle videos in clothing shops.

After queuing there is a dark entrance way. It feels like a cinema, not like leaving an art gallery but like the institution of cinema has been moved into an art gallery.

TH:EC:LO:CK felt like a loving tribute to the history of cinema. Focusing on the clocks reminded me not of the seconds that were passing but of the reward for the seconds that I had spent in a cinema learning about the world and the way that others see it. To me, the power of cinema is its ability to reach out from galleries and the world of art to present ideas to more people, by putting ‘cinema’ into a gallery space it reminded me of this.

As well as affirming the power of cinema TH:EC:LO:CK seemed to foreground the aspect of filmmaking that is unique; the cut. Editing allows for the manipulation of space and time, obviously or invisibly juxtaposing images and sounds together. In a similar way to the use of jump cuts in Breathless my attention was drawn to how this was happening, just as I was being seduced by one narrative thread so that a change of place, colour or time would expose the structures that are used to create the illusion. In this way it was the joy of watching the artist have fun with the form that kept me glued to the screen rather than the power of the narrative that was playing out.

 

A music video that I shot last year for indie trio Cinema.

The lighting setup was a digital projector directly onto the band and two small LED spots at 90 degrees to give some definition. It was shot on a Black Magic Cinema Camera, to soften some of the very sharp images we used a wide angle converter that had been dropped and damaged.

The geometric shapes and segmented backdrops were selected to reflect the 60s stylings the band had chosen for their suits.