Elisa Oliver –University of Chester
Seeing the 1970s: Stasis and Return in Contemporary British Art Practice. Stream, Repetition and Technology

This paper will explore a preoccupation with repetition in contemporary art practice that has been shaped by the electronic technologies of the 70s and 80s, most significantly the pause and rewind of both the VCR and the tape recording, and which as a sensibility comes to maturation in British art from the 1990s.

The aims of the paper are twofold- to probe the effect of aural and visual technologies on the construction of memory as they mature into adulthood and their impact on art practice and to consider a parallel transition of subjectivity that could be defined as pre and post Thatcherism, that creates I will argue, a specific construction of nostalgia. In terms of visual culture this gets lodged, within a pre-occupation with the teenage moment of the 1970s and 80s. In relation to the facilities to articulate that moment a type of spectatorship results that makes ‘seeing the 1970s’ something very particular.

In order to underline the prevalence of return in contemporary culture and the uniqueness of that return that goes beyond a normal generational nostalgia, I want to open with a sequence from the popular recent TV drama ‘Life on Mars’. This particular sequence for me illuminates the temporal paradox that pause and rewind has created and also provides clues to the ways this has impacted on art practice.[1]

For those who don’t know the series it has the unlikely premise of a time travelling cop drama, Sam Tyler an officer with the Manchester Police force in 2006 is in an accident and wakes up in 1973, when he was four. He frequently meets up with his past, including at times his childhood self. In many ways he is literally living inside the temporal displacements of popular media technologies and in a moment, the 1970s, when they first had social impact.  This excerpt is a particularly poignant moment at the end of episode 5 of series 1 which appears as a complete illustration of the effects of such temporal displacements on a sense of self.  Finding himself at the closure of a case outside Manchester City Football ground on the afternoon of a match, Sam is walking through the crowds and passes a father and son on their way to the game. Through a snippet of overheard conversation Sam realises, as he passes them, that this is his father and his childhood self. In a split second, the past, the present moment and his future self come together in a heart rendering sense of realisation, anticipation and loss.

 Nostalgia is a key tenor in this experience but it is not the only one that informs the character of this return. Sam’s dawning awareness of what he is experiencing is represented through the use of slow motion, that characterisation of memory so clearly informed and constructed by the filmic [2]. His sense of loss appears as not only the loss of his childhood, his relationship with his father and 2006 life, but also the erasure of the ability to return, via photographs, television, video and tape recordings that helped construct that moment for him in the first place, that keeps it alive, that underlines that sense of continuity of self. Our contemporary ability to live simultaneously in the past and the present, through the pause and rewind of video, and to continually return, is now lost to Sam as he remains stuck in the 1970s without this facility of repetition.  The plot structure of Life On Mars places us right inside the ‘present moment’ that writers such as Beckett [3] tried so hard to place us in and presents to us the necessity of return as part of the contemporary condition and the reality of the sense of loss and formlessness when it is removed or revealed as an illusion.

For me the key to this realisation is not so much the frequently used slow motion at the significant moment but the sense of oscillation, perhaps better described as lingering or stasis, that is created by the temporal displacements of Sam’s position- displacements that are merely hinted at by the use of slow motion. Sam moves across his past, his present and because of the nature of the show his future in a movement that returns him to the moment but makes overtly clear the impossibility of rehabilitation, through lingering, that constant return would allow. This impossibility pinpoints the substance of a subjectivity that is pre and post pause and rewind. In the 80s, Thatcherism engenders further temporal displacements that impact on social life: the alteration to the working week due to unemployment, the higher incidence of part-time working and the introduction of flexi time, shifting gender roles and the impact on family structure and a particular occupation of space that could be seen as a result of a loss of aspiration in terms of the working class and the product of Thatcherite housing policies-a colonisation that contains and freezes, resulting in ‘lingering’ in space rather than the more mobile, aspiring wandering or walking, historically associated with the flaneur and the birth of the middle classes.[4]

The nature of return in contemporary practice takes on board this oscillation and we see stasis or lingering becoming a key aesthetic that I will argue is the product of this unique nexus of historical circumstances and which for the 60s born generation becomes the locus for a historically specific subjectivity.
One way that it surfaces is with a concern with the static video image in real time, both Paul Rooney and Susan Philipsz demonstrate this, and around a subject matter that engages with the teenage moment previously outlined. This technique resonates across a range of theoretical issues around the still and the moving image. Primarily this is of-course Barthes ‘having been there of the photo’,[5] the photograph as primarily a trace of an exhausted moment and Bazin’s ‘presentness’ [6]of film interestingly distinguished by the ‘frozen’ immobile moment of the photograph and the movement of film suggesting a sense of presence that is associated with the here and now, even if that is not strictly the case. 

The video image in real time plays on these resonances. We have a clear reference to the durational in the paused image, as David Green points out in ‘Marking Time’,[7] demanding a form of attention from the spectator that also takes time and also a static image that connects us to the past. In the employment of real time, a sense of anticipation is also engendered that hints at the possibility of change or movement creating a sense of presence (even in absence) akin to the ‘presentness’ of film. What results is a unique oscillation between past and present that in the condition of stasis, made possible by the technology of pause and rewind, creates the status of lingering that starts to take on its own theoretical trajectory.

We can see how this may function by looking at the Paul Rooney work “Let me Take You There (2003)

fig.1..

This is a video still, in real time, with voice over, listened to on headphones, constructed as an audio guide to a field in Calderdale. The text, spoken by the artist but as fictional creation Alain Chamois, mixes documentary and fictional narratives that centre around an actual documentary made about the photographer who took the seminal photograph that became the iconic image for Joy Division’s single ‘Atmosphere’. It intertwines references to Sylvia Plath, whose grave is nearby, the artists’ own teenage experiences and his love of Joy Division that he describes as, “the soundtrack to my adolescence”,[8] packaged into an overall mediation on birth and rebirth for which photography is the metaphor.
There is a coalescing of past and present within both the image and the text of this work. The text seamlessly works in chance and the arbitrary, and a bit like Beckett’s play ‘Krapps Last Tape’,[9] underlines the way the pause and the rewind of the tape recorder (and ultimately the VCR) helps to make sense of experience by allowing us to edit and restructure the past in terms of the way we may retrospectively remember it, rather than how it actually was. The text avoids interruption as a mark of authentic speech and strangely therefore both reveals it as fiction and at the same time seems to reinstate a sense of authority and inability to revise.
 It creates reflection, but also through stasis, suggests containment, rehabilitating the teenage moment to the present but hinting at a lack of desire or inability to move beyond it an infantilism that Andrew Calcutt in Arrested Development [10]relates specifically to a myth of freedom suggested by the 60s counterculture and therefore a product of the pop phenomenon itself.

 

Aural memory also becomes a key issue in revisiting this teenage moment and its ultimate effect on the subjectivity of this generation is still under-explored. Susan Philipsz works sometimes with images and soundtrack but often with the aural alone. In works such as Songs sung in the first Person On themes of Longing, sympathy and release (2003) she typically reworks songs familiar from her adolescence such as the Smiths or Joy Division, she sings them herself unaccompanied, so there is a sense of being overheard rather than performing to an audience. Often placed in public places or thoroughfares, such as bus stations or entrances to buildings, the works pull on the enduring power that music has to return us to a particular moment, however rather than constructing a narrative to make sense of or possess experience like Rooney’s work, Philipsz works seem more like an negotiation between past and present. We are drawn by the familiarity of the songs which gives us access to our past and also accesses great intimacy underlined by the fact that Philipsz sings unaccompanied. However, their reconfiguration makes us very aware of our present moment; bringing our teenage past to bear on our present, the intimate on the public, they seem to suggest the past and the possibility of the new but again the oscillation between the two moments still seems to underline this past moment as somehow ultimate and defining, not just in a personal sense, but in a cultural sense, initiating a sense of loss.

The final aesthetic dominant of this return is the translation of the photograph into painted image. George Shaw, ’Scenes from the Passion’ (2000-2001)

figs.3.+4

are all works situated around his childhood home in Coventry. The process of making them involves him returning to places that he wandered in as a child and taking photographs, the photographs become a kind of witness to this experience and to the nature of this return.  As in Ralph Rugoff’s ‘Scene of the Crime’ [11]aesthetic we become interpreters, or perhaps a better term is surveillants of our past for in the stasis of these images, the making over of this experience, is given a particular gaze which suggests the surveillance of the camera and its parallel movement that is fixed and contained. The medium/process of the work reinforces this, not just the translation of the snapshot into the permanence of paint, which in itself creates a durational viewing experience, but the fact that the painting creates a greater object-hood for the photograph, which, for Christian Metz,[12] enhances a sense of presence and therefore existence in the moment. David Green, countering the view of the photograph as always in the past, views the photograph as performative and therefore as much to do with the present moment as with a trace of the past. [13]
As such this dominate aesthetic (Rayson, Winstanly)[14] of photo into paint of this generation appears as a play with understandings of the still and the moving image, the pause and rewind of which allows an experience of the past within the present.

Ultimately this takes us back to the body and the loss of the body, significant in all these works, a loss which hints at nostalgia for a lost subjectivity and which demonstrates that loss through a sense of containment at once visual and physical, that returns and lingers, that reconfigures but doesn’t leave behind.