'Disciples'
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DISCIPLES

This is a video installation made by me, Clive Walley, artist and film-maker, with Michael Bennet’s paintings as the manifest content. Some paintings very similar to those in the video are here in the gallery space with it.

This piece is the result of a studio visit I made during Somerset Art Week 2006. Michael was showing the tree paintings in groups of a dozen which he had arranged in rectangular patterns. To a film-maker the visual connection with film-strips was too obvious to miss. After some proper professional discussion he became the most willing of collaborators. For him the original paintings were to be taken as signs for the individual human psyche as much as trees, and his arrangements in dozens is part of the reason he has called them “Disciples”. Because the film is very nearly only his paintings and nothing else, I have used his title for my piece as well.

For many years I have been involved with the overlap of film with painting. When I was making my films for TV I wanted film to mobilise the art of painting; to make the films look a little like paintings look to painters when they are in the process of making them. I wanted TV to open up the experience of making paintings to wide audiences, who perhaps weren’t aware that much of modern painting’s meaning comes from reading them as if you were, yourself, the maker of them.

I was always aware though, that painting as an art form was thousands of years older than film, and was responsible for creating a large part of the sensibility we employ for looking at artefacts and the world in general. That world now includes film, both as artefact and sensibility creator. This roundabout of influence and counter-influence appeals to something in me and the collaboration with Michael Bennet has allowed me to move into a new corner of this fascinating territory.

One of the first things which will be obvious from this show is that the paintings and the video address the viewer in different ways, though I have done as much as possible to make them the same. The video is “spectacular”, that is, larger than life, magically unreal, and floating in a sea of artificial sound which moves us out of our normal experience. The sound was composed by the sound designer, Graham Bowers. The paintings belong in the world of material and we sense the wipe marks and dabs of colour as real things, things we might have physically done ourselves. Though the paintings have equal powers to make us wonder at them, their power is mediated through their material facts, facts we feel in our finger tips. The video has other powers but not those.

This piece should be treated as you would a painting in a gallery and, as with a painting, spend as long with it as it holds your attention. By virtue of the sound design and the edit there are “events”, but there is no beginning and no end.

'Sanctuary'
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SANCTUARY

This installation is housed in Michael Bennett’s studio and his paintings  feature in the show. The sound you will hear has been constructed by Alastair Goolden from recordings he made while Michael was working on the paintings. We are grateful to Michael for the use of this room because it adds reflexive context to our work as we can show our piece on the same wall the original work was made on. As a grid of separate paintings, eight wide and three high, they made a deep physical impression.

At the heart of our piece is the idea of translating and borrowing within the arts. Its first surprise is that Alastair and I can claim credit for making an art video whose subject is so perversely the work of another artist. Not only that but we have taken over his workspace! The purpose of this non-originality is to focus attention on something else.

I have always taken the position that painting is the key visual art form. The evident fact that it has been upstaged by other visual art forms in the last half century is not the problem it might seem because art is a rhetorical process in which argument and position-taking play a very constructive role; off-beat viewpoints can inspire whole careers. So, if painting is the central informing visual art-form, then its borrowings from other media might be seen as increasing its remit, widening its range, not losing ground.

The paintings at the centre of this show have acquired new meanings by virtue of being moved into the world of video art. They can borrow its form of address, its transience and its theatricality while maintaining their place as the original inspiration.

The film language I have employed is minimised to just two forms of mix, with each painting appearing only once and only in full frame. For all that self-effacing focus on the original work, the video does not reproduce the experience of seeing the paintings in this room. They have been translated. A new experience of them inhabits the space in which they came into being; an experience which is perhaps closer to the world our imagination currently lives in, but is both less and more than the experience of a visit to this room, with the real paintings on this wall, a fortnight ago.

'Refuge'
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REFUGE

Three paintings intended to be seen side by side are called a triptych and carry allusions to the altar pieces of Christian art which date back to the Middle Ages. Today the form is more likely to indicate a more general spiritual intention as do Michael Bennett’s latest three paintings which are the source of this “triptych” of films.

The scale of Michael’s paintings and their conceptual discipline makes clear their relationship to the iconic American Abstract Expressionist works of the mid 20th Century, perhaps the last major art movement which emphatically identified with the spiritual dimension of life.

However the references here go back further than that. In Michael’s studio Constable, Corot, and Turner lie around the floor as well as Rothko, de Kooning and Newman. In Barnett Newman’s “Onement” paintings the visual contest between the totemic central stripe, or “zip”, and the rest of the painted surface is central to their artistic purpose. If the tree trunk can be read as the Newman “zip”, so it is in these, but the near denial of gesture and the chosen naturalistic colour pallette also help link them back to Corot and others. The ambition here to sum up and to include across such a wide range of history and philosophies is marked. Yet the pictures are modest and beautiful; there is no bombast.

In my installation I have matched the shape and size of the paintings exactly and we are using the same wall in the same studio that Michael uses. Alastair Goolden has set the visual experience in a sound world created specifically for the room and the images. It is spacious and still.

I have an abiding interest in the relations between the camera and painting. With pictures this large the camera cannot reproduce the meaning of the painting; in the presence of the actual work the eye recognises the palpable construction of the painting and includes that knowledge in its search for meaning. Cameras reduce large paintings to images; you are not allowed close enough to appreciate how that image is held in the web of creative work. By engaging with this “web” of marks and layers of colour I wanted to make a work which immersed audiences in this particular quality of painting. In that regard it is of a piece with all my previous films. Remarkably, with these three paintings, there is a definite resonance between what I have found in the detail and what is expressed by the whole ensemble, a kind of fractal distribution of meaning, which has allowed me to create an autonomous piece from the parts which carries some of the meaning of the whole. CEW 09