by Dragan Zivancevic
selection committee member

People prone to celebrating anniversaries, no matter which ones, probably get a warm fuzzy feeling by the number 10. Those with less of a penchant for celebrating, otherwise happy that the Earth revolves around the Sun, won’t take out their trumpets. The number in front of us first of all means the passage of time. Hence, we not only celebrate our triumphs and failures that make us celebrities, but rather we pay homage to the passage of time itself. This distinctive checkpoint can be read as a keyframe in the movement of an animation whose time is not clearly specified in the script. It is this time category, definitely flexible, that cuts a clear destinction between visual arts.

Video, just like motion picture, cannot function without a determined category of time; in some instances, it could be said that the same goes for other visual disciplines. For example, it seems that painting does not entail that category of time necessary to comprehend works of art. In any case, you cannot say you are late for a picture (unless you are watching it in the process of making in some art reality show!). But it takes some time to grasp a work of art, even though we perceive it at a glance, between two winks on an eye. The level of demand a picture makes on viewers is also varied, regardless of personal perception or affinity. Did the artist want to offer anything more than just an attractive visual impression? What was his intention?

A number of paintings are possible to grasp only from a certain distance in time relative to the point there were made in. For example, is someone like Giotto finally acknowledged after all this time as a benchmark in the development of arts in general, regardless of successive influences in the Renaissance painting in general? How was it at all possible for contemporaries with Montaigne to understand the range of perceptive issues he raised? Of course, they could have sensed it even beyond the rational historical plane.

The great Caravaggio allowed no one to enter his workshop, which never failed to add a whiff of mystical technological know-how to his paintings, both religious and sensuous-allegoric. Will new insights into the modern history of the arts belittle the importance and beauty of his work only because he used new technologies (optic devices, projections), or will this detail be readily disregarded by historians, since it transcended the hard and fast system? Just look at the diametrically opposed views of Giotto and Caravaggio in the works of Bill Viola and Derec Jarman. Seduced by the inner beauty of Asissi frescoes, Viola analyses rhythm, colour, composition and narrative of numerous depicted scenes. In Emergence (2003), he defines the problem in a rational way, in the knowledge that without a genuine, profound faith in the work, pre-faith per se, any spiritual vertical between artists cannot be established.

In Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986), the context in which he perceived the artist was purely socio-erotic, though pictures are factual. Viola claims that the true picture is not visual, while in Jarman‘s view, the inner vision is suppressed by explicit reconstitution of the visual. Contrary to these, my view is pragmatic and commercial, in the spirit of post-modernist intervening.

In the case of Caravaggio, over time some of his most famous works transcended the limits of original media- his monumental compositions (oil on canvas, 323cm x 343cm) in the Contarelli Chapel of the San Luigi dei Francesi Church. By order of small business, they became the prime example of time-based art; contrary to the original concept and thanks to some subsequently positioned device controlling lighting in the Chapel, Caravaggio’s painting The Death of Saint Matthew and The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599-1600) become invisible, dark patches, or lavishly illuminated works. It’s the principle of the binary system par excellence: power on- power off! Those who had not enough coins in their pockets were compelled to view the intricate composition of the old master in only a few minutes before the light went off.

Thus fell through the idea of leading the viewers eye; a thorough study of illuminated figures in the painting relative to the position of windows in the chapel itself. I would like to quote yet another example of the perception of classical painting regarding the artist-viewer relation.

Baroque portraits of many a dignitary are now only known by their ability, or lack of it, to follow with their gaze, countless gallery visitors. That gaze is nonexistent without our subjective movement in the physical world. The movement itself has been programmed long before as a cruising vision that hits the target.

Does it mean that artists have programmed their work for future? Will we in the future view films generating their own inner movement determined by movement of audience? Without audience moving, pictures on the silver screen will be mere frozen frames. The interactive nature of this vision poses endless questions; the nature of the movement itself is inexorably linked to the perception of the viewer. The length of a video/film is not the one featured in the credits; it is individual and expressed as the amount of energy input required from any of us during viewing, and also as an attempt to decode what was perceived. Of course, there are opposite examples which rule out any elaboration on what has been seen, we are not concerned with them here. Number ten (10) is therefore to be seen in any way you want: binary, numerical, symbolical, in a festive or mystic mood… There is only one condition, though: pictures/visions you are sending or receiving/generating should be incentive!