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Cinema
and Encounters with White Light
Exhibited at
Perth Institure of Contemporary Arts, Perth, Western Australia
'Art + Film'
at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 2003
BUS
Gallery, Melbourne
Karen
Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne, 2006
Blinded
by the Light is a mulit-form exhibition that
comprises glow-in-the-dark paintings, lighting and sound. It
chronicles cinematic encounters with light, recreating scenes
from various films in which the characters are confronted
by a bright white light, in situations such as; near-death
experiences, hallucinogenic experiments, and alien or ghostly
encounters. The work encompasses the light-based medium of
film itself through a sequence of fading theatre lights that
reveal paintings which glow-in-the-dark. The exhibition features
twelve paintings that recreate scenes from films such as, Close Encounters, Fearless, Ghost and Poltergeist,
to investigate how people understand extreme situations such
as near-death experiences, hallucinogenic drug experiments,
and alien or ghostly encounters. The works investigate how
the narratives of cinema deal with the mysteries of life and
death, and what is on the ‘other side’, while
encompassing the light-based medium of film itself.
Off
Your Face
catalogue essay by Edward Colless
There
are two kinds of light that can blind. There’s the light
of the sun. White hot, it burns out the nerve endings in the
retina. It’s an irreversible and total negation of sight
that, because its effect is catastrophic and ultimate, assumes
a sublime meaning. The naked sun is blinding in a symbolic
sense because its immense energy – hurled in all directions
toward infinity – is purely and simply burning itself
out. The sun squanders its fortune on a cosmic scale, like
a billionaire depleting their wealth through one furious party.
Only absolute authority can waste itself like this, in a spectacle
of dissipation in which productivity is identical to annihilation.
Stare at the face of a sun-king or a god and their glory (which
is the fabulous expenditure of their essence without work,
return or profit) will incinerate your sight of them. This
hot blindness is the consequence of staring straight into
the origin of light (such as the sovereign’s all-seeing
eye, as devastating as a nuclear blast). The blindness that
results is punishment for transgressing the decorum of vision.
To see without the risk of blindness, our vision needs to
be deflected. We navigate through the world over which the
sun has dominion by looking on reflected light, much like
the way Perseus manages to approach the Gorgan (whose direct
gaze kills those who look on it) by staring at her mirror
image on his shield.
There is another light that blinds. But - unlike the sun’s
light – it is cold. Absolutely cold: absolute zero.
It doesn’t burn; it stuns, seizes and freezes. Its blinding
effect is like a pilot’s white-out in a cloud or snowstorm,
or the split-second glare off a windscreen that floods your
vision of the street. This is the blindness of an animal immobilised
in headlights on a dark road, or it’s the vacant stare
of a party guest into the camera’s flashgun, or an epileptic’s
arrested gaze at a flickering strobe light. Just as the solar
wind disinterestedly irradiates everything, the hot light
of glory is indifferent to those it blinds. Like the blindfolded
figure of Justice – absolute, pure justice – it
is impartial. On the other hand, the cold radiance of the
flare or strobe seems intended for its victims, even if it
treats them impersonally and appears accidental. Like blind
Cupid, its attentions are directed, but erratic.
Rather than a brilliant incinerating expenditure of energy,
this is a light that coldly seduces and consumes. We see it
when we submit to the evil eye, or to the eyes of a mesmerist,
the spotlights on police helicopters scanning the streets,
or the light rays from flying saucers that immobilise solitary
cars and their drivers on country roads. This light incorporates
the eyes that look at it, in the way that the Borg –
the most feared species in the universe of Star Trek:
The Next Generation – incorporates, by a glacial
logic of assimilation into its intensive hybrid state, all
organic life forms. We are the fuel for this light’s
arid appetite. Our sight is abducted by it, and so is flattered
by the ravishment. This is what lures us toward it, spellbound
like children entranced by the incandescent elegance of angelic
extraterrestrials. Our blindness in this case is a sort of
seizure, a captivation: a plateau state rather than an annihilating
climax.
Cold seduction by incorporation is anything but glorious.
This, the second type of light, doesn’t come from the
sun, nor from any dazzling god or sovereign who illuminates
the world. Rather than emanating divine mystery (identified
with a prohibition on looking), this light – ungodly,
parasitical and dazzlingly superficial – is associated
with secrecy and conspiracy and paranoia: with looking everywhere,
inside, outside, above and below. It’s a light allied
to all those nocturnal phantasms or inhabitants of the twilight
zone who challenge, sabotage or undermine solar authority
and its devout, autocratic regents on earth. It is the ethereal
medium in which ghosts and spooks swarm, like blind bats swirling
through the evening sky. It is the voluptuous extinction of
the human will and ego, an empty eternity gleaming lethally
at the end of a dark tunnel. It silently explodes through
windows and from under the doors of research laboratories
when a genetic experiment catastrophically mutates. It haemorrhages
from the eyes of a drug fiend, like ectoplasm pouring out
of a medium in a séance, when they drop the lunatic
dose of a psychotropic substance.
It’s under the cover of this blinding light that all
things alien seduce and abduct their prey. Poltergeists or
other demons use it as an instrument to snatch children from
their parents’ arms. Succubi enclose their supplicants
or sacrificial victims within it. It is ejaculated by supernatural
and superhuman lovers, like the couple at the conclusion of
Luc Besson’s movie The Fifth Element whose
orgasmic embrace fires, in a volcanic convulsion, a searchlight
beam of jism into deep space. In Ron Howard’s Cocoon,
a man peers through a hole in a wall to spy on a beautiful
girl undressing next door. But the peepshow scene is suddenly
flooded with light – blinding, like the original Peeping
Tom, both him and the audience – when, having removed
her clothes, the young woman continues the striptease and
peels off her counterfeit bare human skin. This light, permitting
a glimpse of her naked alien body, is hardly the wrath of
god, but instead the glare and flush of desire.
Alien visitations, out-of-body experiences, hauntings, near-death
experiences: these are not incarnations of providential divinity,
a singular, absolutist and sublime presence; instead, we consider
these supernatural phenomena to be either caused by –
or, perhaps, accessed by – derangement. These are sorts
of scenes that Lily Hibberd paints for Blinded by the
Light: figures approached by, embraced by and succumbing
to the incomprehensible passions of their fantastically luminous,
otherworldly encounters and visitors. The blinding light that
induces these apparitions has to be a travesty of solar light.
Not its inverse or negative, but a counterfeit of sunlight.
It is a false light, conspiratorial; the vehicle of a theatrical
device. And, rather than spiritual illumination or conversion,
the blindness it induces suggests intoxication, a narcotic
or anaesthetic trance: pure spectatorship. A blind faith in
the visible; beguiled, charmed, hallucinatory. It’s
what you see when gazing, off your face, at the hypnagogic
lightshow in a nightclub. Or when spaced out late at night
in front of the tv. Or when taken by surprise by a fluorescent
dangling skeleton in a ghost train.
The
blinding light in Hibberd’s paintings is light that
is a special effect. In a word, a light that is “cinematic”.
The spectral events that she paints are all derived from scenes
in science fiction and fantasy cinema: Close Encounters,
Altered States, Fearless, Cocoon, Fifth Element, Ghost and Poltergeist. Hibberd restages, in suburban homes
and in the studio, those scenes from these movies in which
characters confront a brilliant white light. Using the same
three models for each scene – a woman, man and a baby
– but in different costumes and wigs, she photographs
them doused in a staged version of the lighting effect, and
then paints from that photograph. But these painted scenes
aren’t duplications of the movie scenes. They’re
after-images: manufactured after their cinematic sources,
yet appearing as persistent visions lingering beyond the melodramatic
incidents that provoked them. Another story – a ghosted
story – seems to unfold in consistent wide-screen format
through this series of paintings as Hibberd’s exemplary,
nuclear family is relentlessly haunted, stalked and assailed,
enticed and consumed by an enigmatic force. What Hibberd stages
in these images is a sort of séance, composed in order
to induce a visitation (and consummation) by cinematic light.
Cinema is the phantasm that is summoned in these paintings:
but it is a supercinema – the white light of the projector
flaring through the screen action, just as a ghost manifests
itself in a living room. Is this like the light exposed when
a film breaks in the projector, or when a frame jams in the
projector gate and melts? Not quite. That’s a revelation
of the naked apparatus – the “real” of cinema;
shocking, because to view it we must lose sight of the movie
we are watching. We must, in other words, ignore the veil
of mirages that constitutes the imaginary (or image repertoire)
of cinema. What we might call supercinema, on the other hand,
is not constituted by a negation or even disavowal of cinematic
illusion, but by the hyperbolic affirmation of it. It is an
over-exposure of cinema. Like the naked alien’s body
in Cocoon illuminated by the superimposition of exhibitionism
and voyeurism – supercinema is a body that, as in striptease,
converts even naked human skin into a special effect. This
cinema is a hallucinatory blur resembling the blank white
cinema screen that Hiroshi Sugimoto 1993 repeatedly photographed
in drive-in movies and picture palaces, by leaving his shutter
open for the entire duration of the feature film. Hibberd’s
paintings are, similarly, of an over-exposed cinema, of a
bride stripped bare, down to her desirable alien (rather than
mechanical) substance.
And here comes the bride. A solitary young woman lifts her
bare arm across her eyes shielding them from a blinding light.
She won’t turn away from it, even as it seems to threaten
her; in fact, she seems to be turning toward what she cannot
bring herself to look at. Her grimace could equally be a welcoming
smile. Even as it bleaches out the colour and detail of her
bare skin, this light doesn’t evaporate or dematerialise
the body, or bestow an immaterial aura to it. Rather, it incorporates
the flesh it lights up, becoming a substance that seems, like
icing, to flow and set at once. In the movie from which this
image is taken, Ken Russell’s outrageous s-f acid fantasy Altered States, this light is the consummation of
a research scientist’s experiment in regression to a
primal psychic state – to, as he puts it, the brink
of nothingness. What blinds this woman – the scientist’s
lover – is the monstrously naked discharge of energy
from this horizon of identity, at which the object of desire
is visible only as pure psychic affect, as the mirrored intensive
state of her passion.
Hibberd
has given this painting the same title, Blinded by the
Light, as the exhibition itself. Evidently, she sees
this as an emblematic image if not the premise for the show.
It is also a climax to the narrative suggestions of the other
paintings since it depicts the only figure that is incapable
of directly looking into the light. The painting also poses
a special relation between the viewer and the subject. Immediately
in front of the figure, the source of this incandescent desire
is the viewer in the gallery … and, in the studio, the
artist herself as she paints the image. The identity of artist
and viewer in this case renders the painting a type of mirror,
of both its own production and its consumption. It is an image,
like the lover’s image in Altered States, at
the brink of nothingness. And the longer you look, the closer
to that event horizon you get. Gradually, every five to ten
minutes, the exhibition lights automatically fade out, leaving
you in the dark with nothing but the after-glow of the phosphorescent
pigment used by Hibberd to paint her blinding light. This
after-image of the exhibition is a phantom, a special effect,
visible only by losing sight of the image, while also being
a false double of that image. The image that we take to be
the real subject of the exhibition is a counterfeit human
skin taken off by an alien body in the dark. And in this darkness,
like the darkness of a cinema, we see the lucid substance
of our own desire to be taken in.
© Edward Colless 2003
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