“The face is what one goes by, generally.” ~ Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
untitled (faceburgh photo) - matte braidic 2012
Matte sits at sidewalk coffee shop tables with his dog and takes pictures of people. Later he crops them, adds a watermark, and uploads them to Facebook. To a portfolio page he’s created.
He lives in Pittsburgh. The name Faceburgh made sense. A friend of his designed the logo using Facebook’s font and Steeler’s colors. He watermarks each photo with it.
Matte used to just people watch. Then he got a DSLR camera. He challenged himself to take a thousand pictures, to get better at taking pictures. He took pictures of what he liked looking at. People.
untitled (faceburgh photo) - matte braidic 2012
If you haven’t spent time in Pittsburgh, its a peculiar small-town city made of neighborhoods. Each its own little world. Oakland, college & frat kids & sometimes hippies; Squirrel Hill is jewish with good middle class families, the kids busy not getting into trouble; East Liberty’s working class black vitality; Shadyside is kinda gay and has had a little work done; Bloomfield, mixes Italian with southeast Asian immigrants and yinzers; you can buy Pierogies from the Russian Orthodox church in the South Side flats and Polish Hill is, well, Polish old ladies and also hipsters drinking their favorite cheap beer at Gooski’s, etcetera, etcetera.
I lived in Pittsburgh for eight years. Now I watch that city’s days pass from my perch in Chicago. Facebook sends me invites for nights at the Shadow Lounge and Brillobox. Twitter snapshots the gorgeous profile those hills and rivers give as friends head to and from work, or go out on the town.
Matte’s Faceburgh project windows me into the places where I used to wait, write, read, think, do laundry, coffee, live. I play detective games in my head. Here’s the South Side, that must be in front of the Beehive, check out the cobblestones behind that guy. Ah, that’s where all the buses line up in Oakland, that’s a lot of students. This feels like Bloomfield’s afternoon light, in front of the Crazy Mocha. The same Crazy Mocha where Melissa posted that someone collapsed from a heroin OD out front yesterday. Yeah, that’s my small town concern showing. That’s how place weaves itself into you even though you’re half asleep, chasing ideas boys the next cup of coffee poem performance or opportunity to show your work.
untitled (faceburgh photo) - matte braidic 2012
“He could almost hear these faces telling them why the existed, why they’d been saved. Can there be anything more profound, more satisfying, more curious, Galip thought, than a photograph that captures the expression on a person’s face?” ~ Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book
When browsing through the photo galleries on Facebook, I read expressions. How do his subjects connect to him through the lens? What argument, if any, do they make with being photographed?
Every time I consider Matte’s photos, I think about our society and the culture of surveillance. Perhaps we don’t get pissed at surveillance because we have already consented to it, or because we can’t see the cameras. Or because the public behavior of photographing strangers is ‘for our own good’, ‘for our safety’.
Some of Matte’s subjects flip him off, make some other gesture of ‘opting out’. He takes the picture anyway. Legally, he’s permitted. We don’t own the rights to our own faces. We don’t own the rights to other people’s point of view, of us. Perhaps that’s the button Matte hits with some of his subjects, when they react by confronting him. He reminds them of what they are vulnerable to – the unknown vision of themselves had by the Other behind the camera.
untitled (faceburgh photo) - matte braidic 2012
His tagline is “Our history of Pittsburgh, one face at a time.” Place as setting for all the stories written in the hearts of those who live there. Place as third character in any paired relationship.
The interactivity of his process, inviting audience through the social media portal, invites a cynical yawn but is, simultaneously, effective. Matte needed to select a small group of photos for possible print publication. He did so by inviting Facebook friends to vote. As I browsed through, making my picks, I got to see who amongst my peers shared my likes. Curiously, I shared the most likes with another woman who had left Pittsburgh a few years ago (shout out to Mo Modono).
I’ll leave you with the Facebook album view of Matte’s most recent photographs. And, of course, the link.
untitled (faceburgh gallery - Facebook view)
Matte Braidic’s Faceburgh : https://www.facebook.com/faceburgh
Bruce Cockburn wrote “If I Had A Rocket Launcher” in 1983 after spending time in Guatemalan refugee camps. He witnessed government helicopters coming to the camps, shooting and killing unarmed civilians. He witnessed things he couldn’t deal with very well. He ended up in a hotel, and with his scotch and his tears to keep him company, wrote this song.
The song describes violence directed at unarmed civilians. It seems to condemn violence, but like the snake eating its tail, he closes the song with his wish to use violence to kill the killers.
Yes, we want that. We want to rise from the powerless target, to the powerful, the one holding the gun and firing back. In this illusion, violence demands we answer it on its terms.
What do we make when we choose to do that?
He wrote a song about his emotional struggle in that moment.
Read the lyrics, and extensive commentary from Mr. Cockburn over the years, here.
Sometimes the mistake comes from seeing it all the way through to the end, without having begun.
The ease of overplanning facilitated by computers kills work the cradle. Once the imagination knows what the trip is going to be like, it doesn’t want to take it.
The drafting process is the first third of the path to having the work exist outside the mind/body. Editing is the second third. The audience meets the work, ‘publication’. The last third.
Each stage has its own demands, its own peculiar kind of sweat.
~
I live in a culture steeped in violence. There is violence in the work. Or there is consideration of recovering from violence, contending with it. I have made work that is psychologically or spiritually violent, yet I sit on it. Right now, I do not want to inflict it on an audience.
I am an American. Like other Americans I walk around with the blood of indiginous people on my feet, with the blood of slaves on my feet, with the blood of domestic violence on my feet. History soaked our nation’s birth with blood. We consume images and stories soaked with violence.
We can create peace. How do we create peace from a violent fabric? How does the transformation happen? Does it start with forgiving the past we have inherited, in order to simply let it drop, in order to make something new?
The poetics of annihilation are my name for looking at the violent stories of the 20th century, looking at our inheritance, and figuring out what to do with those stories. There is so much: the US government infecting african-americans with siphilus. The German government killing millions of civilians. The US dropping atomic bombs on Japan. The hundreds of millions of acts of war that individuals perpetrated at the behest of their governments.
How do we choose to witness this? We have our methods of recording, our films, our books, our internet. How can we face the weight of that violent fabric woven by those who went before us, and move forward without re-making that?
How can we, the talking monkeys, see, but not do?
how they wait
March 16 2012 somewhere around 5:30 pm a pedestrian went under the wheels of a metra express train. Delays were for 75 to 150 minutes. People at Des Plaines station were frantically calling for cabs or family members to pick them up, or trying to figure out buses. I started walking, to process a long day at work.
I headed towards the next station. I passed this metra train, waiting, in the dark.
Only after I started taking pictures did I realize the train was full of people. Later, when it finally moved, I discovered a second train was parked behind the one I had been photographing.
In my other life, the life of my job, I have to maintain software certifications on professional creative production software. This involves annual tests of my knowledge of the software. This involves training and retraining on that software – I don’t use all features of each application as a user, but am expected to know all features of that software. This involves reading lots of user manuals.
Spending a lot of time with clearly-written plain language explanations of complex software really helps my art writing. I don’t think I’ve used the word ‘notion’ in over a year.
I’ve puzzled over Cezanne paintings, the ones that took years to make. “Large Pines and Red Earth,” 1890 – 95. “Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley,” 1882 – 85. “The Gulf of Marseille Seen from L’Estaque,” 1876 – 79. What went on in that making-process?
Art historians have projected Cezanne’s historical importance so deeply into his work, I forget when he was making, he was just making.
During my undergrad this student who was a masterful oil painter was challenged by a faculty member to make a painting a day for a semester. He went from making Caravaggio-esque tableaux to painting on car doors and other found objects because he couldn’t afford the canvases.
There was a conversation about technical mastery. The artist himself talked about letting go of ‘being best at’. There was the ridiculous context of academia – everything you do is instantly related to art history.
There was also the romantic idea of artmaking as reactive flash of inspiration, the fertility of imagination. The body becoming a pass-through for immediate ideas.
~ ~ ~
Animation-based video demands weeks or months at a time to make. I lived with that rhythm of production from ’05 to ’09, making 3- to 10-mn films. Deciding to make i.thou was deciding to live with a longer working arc. It was deciding to meet Cezanne.
Sorted out the technical process of making in 2008. I tested several long-form videos on audiences in Pittsburgh that year, with various live bands and poets and things, to learn how the audience read it. I worked with that response.
It really started in 2009. I had the good luck to screen a ten minute clip, i.thou – chapter : the bride at the Three Rivers Arts Festival that year. The audience didn’t really know how to respond, but they did. Good, full-audience slow claps, both nights.
I am a strange creature, a woman artist-auteur. I work from the vision. Holding a vision of this crazy hot mess of a film for three years meant partitioning my imagination. The partition contained a set of ideas, images, footage, text, audio. I cooked those things for a long time.
There’s a set of rules provided by the technology, and rules constructed by me to deal with the technology. Each three-minute scene was discovered as it was made, as the rules of making were put into play.
Part of me was with the work the whole time. Now it is a thing that I write about, and send out to festivals. Vainly, I think I begin to undersand Cezanne, a little more.
One of the audio samples in the i.thou soundscape records CSI’s Catherine Willows (Marg Helgenberger) explaining to Gil Grissom (William Peterson) “Only civilians confuse strippers and showgirls.”
Both the stripper and the showgirl perform as screens for the audiences’ projections. The stripper provides the illusion of sexual access. The showgirl provides the illusion of feminine beauty and perfection. Although its another version of virgins and whores, the game of woman being an object held above or below the looker’s line of sight – never eye to eye – works in a different way here.
In the world of woman-as-drug, the female body becomes the screen for the ideal provision of love (showgirl) or the location where, more crudely, love is ladled out with a generosity that makes it contemptible (stripper, the milder sister of prostitute).
In art, Tracy Emin is the stripper, Georgia O’Keefe, the showgirl. Ms. Emin named those who have had physical access to her body (her sex partners) in her work. Ms. O’Keefe painted exquisite flower forms. Some critics, some audiences projected images of female genitalia, sexuality, and desire into those masterworks. Ms. Emin creates explicitly. Ms. O’Keefe’s work is interpreted by her audience’s projections.
When I screen, read or publish work that presents sexuality or violence (or both), the audience’s projection of imagined experiences on to my imagined personal history is very, very revealing. In Catching the Big Fish, David Lynch reports being asked about making art that has violence in it, and why he does that. I am asked, “How did this happen to you?” My answer? “You’re asking the wrong question.”
Local or distant, news of violence is broadcast into our homes via internet, via tv. Media makes us witness. Entertainment is loaded with it. Violence in American pop culture is like the corn syrup in mainstream diets. Should I passively view this, tacitly accept this? I’ve listened to so many survivors; I have been hurt by violence my self. In our bully culture, who hasn’t?
Talking about the particulars of “my story” identifies me with those particulars. Becoming the accident driven by on the highway is not the point of making art.
I wove the i.thou assemblage of stories I found in the world, stories I fragmented to reveal something about the form in which the story is told. The world, too, is the stripper, the showgirl, the field for our projections. Just like the movie screen.
If the viewer researches the appropriated story-fragments, more meaning emerges. The audience can look as deeply as they want to look.
So, this showgirl arranges abstraction for you to project into, maybe take a trip, maybe discover something, and have something to talk about or argue with at the end.
This is what happens when I finally get around to grabbing a hex editor for mac OS X.
still : ripley torches lab (from i.thou 2012)
I’m at a 40 minute rough cut of the work I started in 2009. At some point I calculated it takes roughly 20 hours to make a single minute of footage. Now that I’m seriously working the audio, the time involved has gone up yet again.
I’ve included snippets of Rihanna singing with Eminem, both the video footage and cutting up her singing. There’s something really interesting happening there – using a fiction of domestic violence (the video itself a little movie featuring Megan Fox) and the image of a singer known for having been assaulted in her relationship. Rihanna sings “love the way you lie” as part of that fiction of domestic violence; woven into this mess, its also about the illusions fed to us by film, by our senses.
Every audible reference has play in the visual stories threaded through the work. Rihanna sings “you watch me burn”; the viewer watches Joan of Arc burn in i.thou; at the end, a resurrected Ripley burns her former nursery/the lab, including a mutilated sister-self who asks for death.
Oh, illusion. You’ll just have to watch the finished thing once I get it on screen.
Video visible in two alternate views, depending on the available space. As three channel installation, with three 20 mn films running parallel, in loops; or as single channel installation, one 60 mn video, looped, dependent on the viewer’s stamina and memory to comprehend the work.
~
a poetic expression of recursive thought and its relationship to memory.
The architecture of memory altered by perspective, by the passage of time. We reshape information to suit a point of view. We forget, we reconstruct.
No information is static; we have relationship with story, a dance that changes it and ourselves. Unattended information decays in the world. Information we pay attention to flourishes and changes as it becomes lively with that attention.
I processed flaws into the footage and audio, purposefully creating accelerated decay in the data. Structural information is removed (or ‘forgotten from’) from the data. Information collapses in a powerful metaphoric way.
sketchbook : miniature daschund as cerberus (2006)
one minute of the king
one minute of the king altered (ffmpeg + avidemux video codec editing tools)
the messenger of death (2009) my entry for clytemnestra reMix, a martha graham dance company project that allowed footage of ms. graham’s choreography for single characters from her archetypal piece clytemnestra to be manipulated by video artists.
