Dane
Picard: Big Picture
Whether it's Simon Leung squatting in Berlin as a way of using
the subject within the urban environment to make visible the
expulsion of the Vietnamese community from Germany in 1992,
or Michael Asher dragging a weathered bronze statue of George
Washington inside to its period room in the Museum of the Art
Institute of Chicago to recontextualize the statue and shift
its meaning, Pluralism still doesn't seem appropriate as a term
to address contemporary art production. Because of the cumulative
effects on visual culture by a broad range of theorists and
writers, and artists such as Duchamp and Warhol, Robert Smithson
and Mary Kelly, art can absorb any subject, position, process,
act or gesture. Everything is available for scrutiny, and it's
this scrutinizing that the artist engages in that is resonant.
It's the constituent elements, what they signify and how this
shifts when repositioned or contextualized within new constellations
that produces the uncanny moment. The complexities involved
in an artist's practice come about through this process of uncovering,
and seeing is redefined, not denied.
The films that Dane Picard makes allow the viewer to see the
edges of things. Even in how the videos are presented is of
interest, because it's not the seductive cocoon of the darkened
theatre, where the viewer is physically overwhelmed by the environment.
It's negotiated instead within the bright light of the exhibition
space, allowing the viewer to maintain a physical and perceptual
autonomy. Picard's exhibition in June 2005 at Richard Heller
Gallery, titled Flourish, featured several single-channel video
loops displayed on LCD monitors, hand-held devices and by projection.
Each video presents a magician performing what is termed a 'flourish'.
As distinct from a magic trick, a flourish is described as a
unique way of "presenting, manipulating and playing with
everyday objects," such as cards, coins, cigarettes, or
simply one's own hands. The flourish is necessary because 'magic'
is a choreographed gesture meant to be repeated; there is no
invention. Each video composites several tricks occurring onscreen:
the frame is tightly cropped to the magician's hands, with the
sounds of the magician breathing, the noises that the fingers
make snapping a lighter open, or the sound of hands handling
a deck of cards surrounding the visuals. As the different magicians
go throught each evolution of their performance, it becomes
clear where these mechanics end and the point of individuation
begins. Because the videos loop, there is an opportunity to
observe this delicate seam. It's like the aspect in painting
or drawing, where the deviations in form from a perfect copy
are accused of accumulating into style.
It's key that he makes this match between film and magic; the
impossible task is achieved either through the choreography
of the trick, or accomplished through filmic means. The camera
colludes with the magician; fingers appear to be missing, and
are then reattached by the opposite hand. Concealed beyond line-of-sight,
the fingers of the magician's hand were dropped back behind
the palm, like a shadow cast by the moon. Where magician Dan
Wilson flips a cigarette into his mouth from his extended arm,
the footage then reverses, and the cigarette is brought back
into his hand (too) precisely. Through this technological means
of representation, the body is redefined by this capacity. Technology
extends human capability, acting here as a prosthetic for the
performer.
An intimate story located in the public space of the gallery,
Picard's video titled Portraits, IDs and Snapshots #2 from 2000,
features a series of still photographs taken of Picard from
infancy through to the present, which morph one into the other.
"A river of images flowing continuously across the screen,
"(1) it's not the separate, distinct image, the snapshot
by itself, but what's between the images and how it accumulates
that is the work's ground of transformation. It presents the
subject seductively, the shapes of life playing themselves out
in a matter of seconds, mesmerizing and unnerving the viewer.
Still, Picard's face seems to stabilize somehow within the whorl
of animation; it remains static while the individual characteristics
of each separate snapshot shift from one into the next. The
video makes use of the medium in a way that challenges it; it
reveals the pause, the economy of absence through the effect
of the animation and how it plays with a variety of scales in
personal time. Removing the bank of time within one's own history
(as constructed by snapshot), the animation forces the portraits
into a temporal and formal compression. Frustrating the single
point of view, the shape-shifting portraits produce a sense
of materiality in the digitized images and show a progressive
development between form, time and space. Video shows this capacity
for a compelling dimensional presence through the critical structuring
used by Picard, and by other artists, such as the use of multiplicity
by Stan Douglas in Win, Place or Show, or the narrative connectivity
of the synchronized dual projections in Shirin Neshat's Rapture.
It reflects on our own condition, pornographic in its way, about
obsession and excess, processed through the nature of the sublime,
the overwhelming encounter which leaves one outside language.
Elizabeth Pence
September 2005
(1) From a review by Jody Zellen, Art Papers, Mar/Apr 2004.