SYLVIAN FLANAGAN, ME, THE PLACES WHERE YOU WE
NT: GALAPAGOS ART SPACE • BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
Sylvain Flanagan’s installation piece: “Me,
the Places Where You Went” was first presented at Galapagos Art
Space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It is a 14 minute long sequence of
slides with a synchronized vocal sound track projected onto three identical
large screens placed side by side in the darkened exhibition space.
Flanagan works with a dissolve unit which synchronizes the projectors
and the soundtrack. His voice is recorded in a previous session, without
instruments or mixing, and is performed to a carefully composed sequence
of slides which he marks out on a score sheet. The optical quality of
the slides is well suited to the long-exposure night shots which characterize
the work.
At first a sound. A low growling jeer, almost machine-like.
Rising now a little. Testing.
In front of us a night shot of a single scraggly tree,
harshly etched in some mercury glow near a wall. Almost black and white.
Definitely werewolf this sound. Not human.
Where from? Is it the tree? A concealed observer? Images
multiply. The tree is shifted. Blurred differently.
Our point of view moves. We approach. The sound grows
louder, more expressive, insistent. A mocking, pre-human song.
Cut to a curb captured under the subacqueous glow of
sodium lights. The voice changes to a demented humming. We approach
at a tangent. The photos appear in a rotating variety of combinations.
An eye which retains, follows, compares. There is an almost soothing
sense of rhythmic mobility. With each changing scene the voice shifts
register. An acrobatic range of vocal effects accompanies these sequences.
Our eye is like a sonar. Sight goes out and sound comes back. Our ears
create the location. Each separate scene is both a part of the whole
as well as being a distinct little world of its own.
Cut to a turbulent morphing cloud of white beasts and
personages locked in a vaguely distinguishable battle. The voice is
an outraged caricature-like chatter. We see a raft, a sleeping figure,
a jumping ram, a whale. An anthropomorphic pile of snow crossing in
the night. With every approaching shot the chatter becomes increasingly
hysterical until it finally reaches a barely sustained climax.
A dozen separate scenes comprise the total piece. The
concluding sequence of images breaks with the nocturnal quality of the
rest. The voice becomes a distant chant. A row of autumnal trees towers
above us; in the stratospheric daylight sliding past, the ground is
invisible.
With simple means Sylvain Flanagan creates a strong
impact on the viewer. The environment of the work manages to suggest
an inner psychological space through the combination of sound and multiple
images. Throughout the set we sense an underlying unity. Like a solitary
limping adventure among abandoned theater props in an electric Surreal
décor with a disembodied voice for company. Motion of the image
is a component part of seeing this piece. Stop-action images grouped
in jump cut sequences. A shuttered spatial dance of the eye moving in
a slow-motion staccato. Time is disconnected and threaded together again
by song. Everything is in a state of flux.
The camera slides like a violin bow on chords of electric
light. Visual features ringing in the concussion of mercury and sodium
discharges. Images are not fixed but slide past like humming fish in
the murky depth. Photos which are not composed but walked past, swung
into. The speed of progress is unclear. Somewhere between hovering and
rapid movement. Intervals are indeterminate, expanded and contracted
like thought processes. Images hesitate and advance, in the same way
that they are sometimes compared, delayed and multiplied in the mind’s
eye.
There is an ambiguous relationship between the image
and the sound. It is both an accompaniment to the image and a response?
Is it onomatopoeic—the sound of a thing’s name shaped by
the way it looks? Or is it synaesthetic—one sense directly translating
itself into another? Is each one of these scenes a long drawn out onomatopoeia,
a word beginning to form through the sensation of light, or is it cross-wiring
at a perceptual level, a kind of hallucinatory echo? The voice plays
the role of a primordial chorus accompanying us through this voyage.
An antediluvian song of some sort. An emergent tale which is not told
but felt. In which the eye and the voice still form one indivisible
entity.
The piece has a Dionisiac feel. The fleeting passage
of some intelligent spirit, never still; seeing but not seen. A disembodied
observer, a shadow traveling on a modest initiating voyage, through
stages of discovery; a kind of pocket Gilgamesh epic. With simple tools
and subject matter, Flanagan manages to create a world that is coherent
and captivating. As with his former photo series, Flanagan’s work
gives the impression of dealing with the images as a membrane, which
is floating, located between the viewer and the artist. The tension
arises from the persistent desire of the work to break through this
boundary or perhaps to dissolve it by confounding it.
Although the voice is equally present throughout the
gallery space, it sometimes seems to originate from the viewer’s
side, while at other times from the image itself. It can be understood
as migrating from one side to the other, creating a collapsing or telescoping
of the normally three distinct elements: the artist, the art work, and
the viewer. In this case all are contained in the same space. A new
kind of language emerges, where the clarity of the eye and the guttural
singing voice create a bond between the primordial intelligence of seeing
and the pure sensuality of being; where subjectivity and objectivity
are not yet separated.
I feel this piece explores the area between seeing
and recognition. It creates a mask between the spectator and the world,
which we wear and through which we must experience it. It is a pre-conscious
space in which images and afterimages switch back and forth in a stop-action
dance on the inner surface of the mind’s eye. The gallery reveals
split-second thought-sequences, neurological pulse trains broken down
and developed into song. It can also be viewed as a kind of synaesthetic
description, in which pictorial and musical means are employed to model
fragments or micro-fragments of consciousness. Time is sandwiched between
the blinking of the eye and the humming of the mind.
Is the voice a natural counterpart to the eye? Singing
while you look at something is almost like singing while you draw. It
is a most natural way of heightening the effect of the image and its
sensual charge. Children often begin sing to themselves while drawing.
They just as easily switch back and forth from tinkling chromatic melodies
to descriptive sound effects. Is this just a form of self-absorption
or is it the means to a greater range and dimensionality in what starts
as a visual work? Sight is built up over a multitude of stages, beginning with
a simple spatial frequency spectrum and passing through a number of
hardwired quantitative and qualitative tests. Our vision pieces together
a conscious image through many layers of wordless poetry which, in our
hypertextual daily routine, has become a cacophony of enumerated lists,
a fever of naming and identifying things as they are perceived. This
is a condition we can attenuate and sometimes escape from. The battle
is to keep a more direct sensibility ringing as we gaze around us at
the world.
Sylvain Flanagan works at keeping this sensibility
alive.
Bernardo Zavattini
Brooklyn, New York
2001