The aura
He freezes a shot from a black and white movie and blows it up into a big drawing using charcoal or black stone. Placing the drawing on a wall in a small darkened room of a gallery, he then projects the original still frame of the shot on the drawing, this time adding slight movements to break the register of the filmed image on its drawn copy.
In another work, he remakes the extreme close-up of bleeding eyes of a massacre victim in the film “Mexican Standoff” by photographing a friend with eyes made to look like they’re shedding tears of blood. He then copies the photograph in a wall-size drawing of black stone and films it as still frame.
Using editing software, he lets the photographic reproduction gradually replace the drawing in a dissolve. How the drawing transforms into the photograph that it copies is so slow, you don’t actually notice it as you watch the video projected on the wall of a darkened room in the gallery.
Such is the work of French artist Jean-Marc Forax, who is now in the University of San Carlos Department of Fine Arts for a short residency. A big fan of Manny Pacquaio, the Parisian artist comes to Cebu to do research on Philippine boxing for his next series of drawings and video art.
Already he has gone to a local gym to film local boxers train there, a rare opportunity, as normally the athletes don’t want to be filmed before a fight, especially by foreigners who could leak the footage to their opponents.
But Jean-Marc is an artist who is more bent on using drawing and video to investigate how a fragment of reality captured by the camera could be presented to us in multiple layers of reproduction. A drawing reproduces a filmed image that itself is an imitation of reality. Cinema thus becomes painting and, when projected as video with accompanying sound in a room, we are presented with a confusing spectacle that takes on architectural space and temporal dimensions.
The image is many times removed from its original context as it goes through this series of reproductions. There is, in other words, a sense that something has been compromised in the process. The philosopher Walter Benjamin uses the word “aura” to refer to the “eliminated element” or “that which withers away in the mechanical reproduction.”
Cinema is unprecedented in its capacity to mass-produce artistic experience often at the expense of the aura. For example, we see rare glimpses of the ruins of Manila, fresh from the bombings of the Second World War, in Lamberto Avellana’s 1956 film Anak Dalita. But historical curiosity in what could have been a Philippine neorealist classic is easily undercut by the movie’s melodramatic content.
Having a master’s degree in Japanese cinema, Jean-Marc is interested in how film may make or unmake the aura. Deliberately reproducing the same image in different media, he heightens the sense of redundancy and thus invites us to reflect on the question of what constitutes the “real.”
Video is inherently fleeting, but here the artist uses it to arrest an image. Art thus becomes self-parody as editing is used not anymore to facilitate—to borrow the terms of philosopher Gilles Deleuze—“movement-image” or the representation of facts in an assembly of images in continuous flow but its reverse, which is to deliberately halt or rather impede movement. The still frame is thus prioritized over the illusion of its movement forcing us to ponder on how this is made possible despite the quirk in human perception which tends to see only the succession of images and not spaces between them.
Film and painting, although both employed in this case, betray their original goal, which is to represent reality. Such goal is put into question and that questioning is the meaning of the work.
In fact, in many instances, contemporary has investigated whether representation is possible in the age of mechanical reproduction. As everything becomes a copy of a copy of a copy, ad infinitum, art has no choice but to turn against itself. Its very own processes of portraying the outside world become the subject itself.
We are thus led to trace how in the language of artistic articulation something is lost in translation. And yet, it is also in art that we are made aware of this loss, this concealment of history under the layers of its own reproduction.
