About Without Moving / Without Stopping

From his outpost in the Ardeche at the end of the 192Os Max Ernst would look through his pile of La Nature dating from the 1880s and 9Os vicariously reliving the fascination its readership had had with whole ranges of optical devices-praxinoscopes, zootropes, phaenakistiscopes-through which an early version of the "movies" was then being imagined. The toys of children, the attractions at village fairs, the after-dinner amusements of middle class families, these had been the devices of visual prestidigitation: producing astonishing effects of three-dimensionality and of images in motion. But as he knew all too well, the movement, far from being fluid, was captive to the intermittence of for example, the little slitlike openings along the drum of the zootrope. Through each of these slits you could see an image on the far side of the drum's inner wall, each one a single station in a sequence of positions, the frozen moment from within a recorded burst of motion. As the drum turned each new slit would uncover an additional position, the whole revolution revealing the entire arc of activity a bird's wings dipping as its neck strains forward and then lifting upward as its head retracts. "Flight" would thus be captured in the circuit of the drum and giddily released for the onlooker.1

Max Ernst: A Little Girl Dreams
of taking the Veil, 1930

Full and Partial Panorama Illustration,
QTVR 2.0 Authoring Tools
Suite Documentation

Louise Lawler's 'Without Moving / Without Stopping' is a series of QTVR (QuickTime Virtual Reality) movies and captions. The many captions are not fixed to the specific movies. Each download of a page, will create new captions and new relations between captions and images. A lack of fixed relations is intrinsic to 'Without Moving / Without Stopping'. The viewer is engaged in a series of 'frameless' photographs. Each QTVR affords a 'total' picture of the scene, but because the viewer must constantly frame and reframe the image, the work goes beyond traditional still panoramic photographs, investigating the concept of framing and assuming the 'double pleasure'2 of analysis and synthesis. 'Without Moving / Without Stopping' is an instance where a picture is worth a thousand pictures and a caption contextualizes only a moment.

The elusiveness of Lawler's work counters the 'total' and panoptic nature of QTVR. With the zootrope, that fascinated the artist Max Ernst, the intermittent image and its reliance on retinal memory give way in QTVR to a seamless state of imagery that must be stopped in order to be viewed. The moving image sought in the nineteenth century optical devices like the zootrope is replaced by the 'moving eye' in QTVR. Such turning on its head of the precursor to movies makes more clear the analogous relationship that QTVR appears to have to future immersive or virtual reality technologies. Andy Warhol's 'Empire' (1964), a 480 minute movie emphasizes duration over movement creating in the process a still movie. QTVR may conceal duration but it also reverses the emphasis of movement from the viewed to viewer and in the process creates a moving still. Such a technological twist submerges the failure of fluidity in the zootrope to create a liquidity of imagery in QTVR that hides and internalizes the impossible seamlessness of the moving still. The representation of the 'instant' and the continuity between you and the viewed scene -- the willing belief that you are part of the context -- are the submerged slits of the zootrope. We 'know' this representation is impossible but we are 'captured in the circuit of the drum' and at least partly giddy that we can move without moving and stop without stopping and frame without framing.

But "flight" was nonetheless syncopated by the march of the little openings passing before your fascinated gaze, separated as they had to be by stretches of blankness. Onto the effortless freedom of the bird's forward motion would thus be projected the stop-and-go flicker of these visual interruptions. This hiccup, this jerkiness, this twitch, would enter the projection of early films, from nickelodeons to silents, finally to be internalized in Chaplin's very walk, as hitching up his pants and bouncing his cane he imitated the tremor that constantly palsied the visual space of primitive cinema, everyone seeming to march to the sound of an invisible drummer.3

Zootrope

The 'stretches of blankness' in Rosalind Krauss' description of the zootrope refer again to the slits and the blank spaces between them; the spaces that our mind 'forgets' in order to view the motion. QTVR has no blank spaces in regard to pixels or image content. But in a conceptual sense Lawler hopes to present the blank spaces submerged in the seamless contextual representation of her QTVR movies. The 'stop-and-go flicker' of the zootrope is not present visually in the QTVR movies but are internalized in the representation of the scenes. Lawler's relentless unframing or unbridled adoption of the random, recreate the 'stop-and-go flicker' - the reminder that this is an illusion - not just visually, that is not the blank spaces that our mind chooses not to remember but the 'blank spaces' between moments for example, like the time between the downloading of web pages or the 'blank spaces' between us and the 'objects' we view and experience. These spaces if remembered or noticed break the continuity and perhaps reveal experience to be a series of contextualized moments or 'frames' that depending on their orchestration or not, like the frames of the zootrope, may or may not bear any sensible relationship to each other.

'Without Moving / Without Stopping' causes the 'tremor that' once 'constantly palsied the visual space' of the zootrope to surface by randomizing the 'still' of all three of the QTVR movies and the accompanying captions. An intitial download of the title page may present the following images: 'select1_3.gif', 'select2_1.gif' and 'select3_6.gif' with the following captions: 'plaster', 'reconciling the past' and 'without touching'. Select 'reload', and another set of stills and captions might appear: 'plaster', 'plaster' and 'more than you wanted'. Select 'reload' again and yet another random configuration. After selecting an individual movie to view, it may not be apparent, but the relationship to the accompanying caption is fleeting. A subsequent visit or 'reload' will reveal another caption for the same movie. This anchorless set of relations may 'palsy' our sense of meaning of the artwork but it is a result of accepting or adopting the 'frameless' condition of QTVR. Lawler's use of QTVR emphasizes the lack of certainty in the image as opposed to the totality of the image that the technology appears to provide.

The panoramas were photographed in the Museum fur Abgusse Klassischer Bildwerke in Munich, which houses plaster copies of classical sculpture dating back to ancient Greek and Roman times and through to the Renaissance. Intended primarily for museum curators and art historians, the works are not arranged for static display -- each copy sits on a pedestal with wheels, enabling each viewer to create individual groupings according to his or her specific needs and interests. Thus the display which the QTVR movies present is as anchorless as 'Without Moving / Without Stopping'.

Stereoscopic Projections,
La Natur (1891)

...From the pages of La Nature it was perfectly evident to him [Ernst] that the nineteenth-century audience of this magazine of popular science liked to play with both analysis and synthesis at the same time, wishing to be captivated by the appearance of the spectacle and, like the child in front of the clock he has just dismantled, wanting also to be connected to its inner works. The magazine had catered to this double pleasure. Ernst looks at an illustration in which such an audience is shown sitting spellbound in front of a screen onto which an anaglyphic image is being cast by means of a stereoscopic projector. Waistcoated, goateed, or in stays and flowered hats, each of the viewers is wearing glasses, one lens red and the other green, as he or she stares at the utterly enthralling display of a cow in 3-D drinking from the banks of a startlingly convincing stream. For the reader, looking on from outside, everything is labeled, the red beam, the green one, and, where they cross, the emergence of white light. This both-at-once, this being caught inside the illusion and this looking on nonetheless from without, would, he understood, suit his purposes perfectly. It would manifest that peculiar feeling you have when you dream and even while captured by the emotions of its drama you can speak of yourself as someone else: "You're only dreaming, you know."...4

Louise Lawler: Once there was
a litle boy and everything
turned out all right.
the end; b/w photo

The analysis of Lawler's approach aims to dismantle the institutional framing of the art work that reinforces concepts like art as a rarified object, the privileged view of the artist and the authority of the institution itself and the dominant culture it represents.5 Lawler succinctly states: "Art is part and parcel of a cummulative and collective enterprise, viewed as seen fit by the prevailing culture. My work always includes the work of others."6 The analytic function of the work is to reposition the viewer by disrupting the continuity between them and the art object, to reveal the 'slit' of the zootrope or the forgotten blank spaces that aid the illusion. In large part, the aim is to create a less stable interpretative space for the object that does not enforce a 'more truthful' presentation of the object but opens up the readings of the work as elliptical and subject to interpretation.

In the case of 'Without Moving / Without Stopping' the photographed sculptures are themselves references to other art works. These plaster casts are the 'good' cousins of the copy if Lawler's own work can be seen as the 'bad' cousins of the copy. The plaster casts acknowledge their copy status but try to maintain or uphold the transparent framing of the original art work even though the context may not equally uphold its end, the wheelable pedestals for example. The artist must be fascinated by this 'link' to her own work as copies and the context of the Museum fur Abgusse Klassischer Bildwerke, a strangely familiar and unfamiliar 'parallel' world to the museums that house and collect original art objects.

To deal with this unfamiliar world 'Without Moving / Without Stopping' is created within the 'mechanical apparatus' of the network and the computer. The technology is intrinsic to 'Without Moving / Without Stopping', similar in many resepcts to the Surrealist adoption of technology which often left its mark or had an indexical relationship to the work, for example Rayographs or frottage. The Surrealists use of mechanical apparati often exploited its indifference and mechanical randomness to create disruptions that opened a new and unfamiliar subjective space. Therein lies the 'double pleasure' of analysis and synthesis, as Krauss describes Max Ernst's reading of "La Natur", the 'wishing to be captivated by the appearance of the spectacle and, like the child in front of the clock he has just dismantled, wanting also to be connected to its inner works'.

The synthesis of 'Without Moving / Without Stopping' lies in the resulting open interpretive space Lawler creates for the museum and the objects. Their is still an illusion or a belief that compels us to want to see and collect these objects even as 'copies', while maintaining a contextual slippage, like the wheels under the pedestals or the realization that the viewpoint is actually from the many 'blank spaces' between the frames.

Ron Wakkary 1998

notes:

1. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge Mass: The MIT Press, 1993) p. 206.
2. see note 4.
3. Krauss, p. 206
4. Krauss, p. 209
5. see for example: Claude Gintz, The Same and the Other in the Work of Louise Lawler (Saint-Etienne: Maison de la Culture et de la Communication de Saint-Etienne, 1987).
6. email letter to the author 1998