Tony Conrad
Undone
January 22 – February 27
8th Floor
Framing Forms
In storytelling it may be possible to separate the language of the story from the contextualizing “framing” words that say what an author is about to do. This is the story of my “Yellow Movies”. The framing language is an axe blade, a precipice or cusp dividing the voice of the account into the teller and the told. In the “Yellow Movies,” a black edge serves this framing function. What stands within the demarcation formed by the sharp inner framing edge of the screen rectangle is part of the story; everything else is there to play a “helping” role.
Whatever “help” the author may provide, the space inside a screen frame belongs to the viewer. But a screen space is temporally loosened from the viewer’s moment; it is the potent(ial) field for images of the past, of the present, of the future: that is to say, the screen space is the topos of the image/ination.
Just as some other kinds of art are fulfilled only through the co-presence of the viewer—through the visitor’s psychic projection into a social space they share with the work—film frames are doubly-incomplete spaces: incomplete on the one hand in the haptic imagery offered by the work, and on the other hand in the psychic projection which the visitor may wrest from this encounter.
Tony Conrad 1/20/2016