archiveclaerbout

David Claerbout, The American Room (still), 2009-10; single-channel video projection, dolby digital encoded surround 5.1 channels, 24:29 min.; courtesy the artist and galleries Yvon Lambert, Micheline Szwajcer, Hauser & Wirth; © 2011 David Claerbout.

Exploring Narrative vis-a-vis Deconstruction of Motion

San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street
415-357-4000
San Francisco
David Claerbout:
Architecture of Narrative
May 21 through September 6, 2011

David Claerbout's striking video installations address the complex relations between the genres of photography and cinema. His "architecture of narrative" is based on his meticulous work with digital photography and video to explore an understanding of time and space that the artist describes as "omni-directional." The scenes evolve without traditional narrative direction, instead exploring temporality and the compression and suspension of a moment from a variety of perspectives.

David Claerbout: Architecture of Narrative, an exhibition featuring a suite of four projected video works by the Belgian artist David Claerbout is organized by Rudolf Frieling, SFMOMA curator of media arts, the exhibition spans work from 1998 to the present, marking Claerbout's first solo museum show on the West Coast and the U.S. premiere of his recent piece The American Room (2009-10).

The artist often depicts a single moment of action — seemingly frozen in time — in a slow succession of images in the format of a digital slideshow. Through a multitude of different angles and vantage points, the camera analyzes each digitally constructed scene and the motionless group of figures waiting in anticipation. Whether fictional or based on a found photograph, these subtle narratives reflect an attention to detail, emphasizing natural elements like daylight and shadows that suggest movement and the passage of time.

Claerbout also explores the characteristics of interior and exterior architectures. "The selected works in this presentation share an examination of the role of architecture and its political underpinnings — evocative of four different periods here — as part of the artist's larger interest in issues of modernity and collective memory," Frieling explains. "The works manifest an aesthetic as well as conceptual interest in the construction of perception."

The American Room (2009-10) is Claerbout's most technically ambitious work to date. In the piece, a group of people are seated at a musical recital for an American diplomat in an intimate, formal setting. The concert, however, is halted in time, with the singer forever about to sing as the camera slowly pans around the scene, zooming in and out and examining the audience from different vantage points. While the scene appears to take place in one room, each audience member was individually filmed against a blue screen and then painstakingly composited to form the assembled group. This method allowed for infinite camera movement through a three-dimensional composite space. Music figures prominently in the piece as well, with sound travelling spatially to reflect the position of the camera in the digitally constructed environment, further establishing cohesion between the composited parts while gradually allowing for a progressive understanding of the politically charged context.

In Sections of a Happy Moment (2007), Claerbout hones in on a Chinese family gathered around a ball suspended in midair. All of the family members' faces are turned towards the ball, and they are smiling happily in the courtyard of a nondescript estate evocative of the optimistic programs of modernist housing in the 1960s. Over the course of 25 minutes, this moment in time is analyzed from a multitude of different angles and perspectives, allowing the viewer an omnipresence that is paradoxical. The fragmentation of time in this piece, through freeze-frames of the same moment, creates paradoxically a sense of cinematic continuity and duration. Like The American Room, underlying tensions build as the work progresses. Coupled with highly sentimental piano soundtracks, the artificiality of these moments gradually evokes a range of associations, from the history of cinema to the controlled imagery of propaganda and political surveillance.

In another work analyzing cinematic conventions, Claerbout's White Hous• from 2005 is an approximately 13-hour video projection made from 73 almost-identical, individually filmed short scenes of a dramatic fight between two men amidst an abandoned colonial-era building. Each take is about 10 minutes in length and grows progressively darker as the sun rises and falls both in the video and in the world outside of the museum where it is shown; the work is timed to the opening hours of the museum, starting with 11 a.m. As the viewer watches the narrative repeat with two different soundtracks — the dialogue is audible on headphones, and only ambient sounds play on the speakers — the setting takes center stage with its lighting and atmospheres. The artist is interested in what duration—the actual passing between sunrise and sunset — does to the gaze and how the gaze shifts between the film narrative at the foreground and the details of the architecture and landscape in the background.

Referencing Claerbout's earlier, more minimalist work is a fourth, silent piece. Kindergarten Antonio Sant'Elia 1932 (1998) is based on a photograph at the opening of the new kindergarten in Como, Italy, dating from 1932, during the period of Italian Fascism. In the work, children play in the school's functionalist garden designed by architect Giuseppe Terragni — a quiet moment haunted by the knowledge of the impending repression and political turmoil these children were subjected to.

Claerbout was born in 1969 in Kortrijk, Belgium, and currently lives and works in Antwerp and Berlin. He studied at the Nationaal Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp from 1992 to 1995 and originally trained as a painter but soon ventured into photography and video. Since 1996 he has been featured in many solo and group shows around the world, including the retrospective David Claerbout: the time that remains currently at the WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Belgium and a major international touring project titled The Shape of Time, which travelled between 2007 and 2009 to the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts; the Kunstmuseum St.Gallen in Switzerland; the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver; the De Pont Museum for Contemporary Art in the Netherlands; and the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. He has also had solo shows at Yvon Lambert in New York (2008), Lenbachhaus, Munich (2007), the NCA Gallery in Tokyo (2006), and the DIA Center for the Arts, New York (2000).

David Claerbout | Sunrise, 2009 Still 20 C Single channel video, Courtesy de Pont Museum for Contemporary Art, Tilburg, © David Claerbout.

David Claerbout | Riverside, 2009 I Still girl 43 Video installation, David Claerbout and galleries Hauser & Wirth, Yvon Lambert, Micheline Szqajcer, Rüdiger Schöttle, Jörg Johnen, © David Claerbout.

David Claerbout Deconstructs and Reconstructs Time in Historical Context

David Claerbout | Long Goodbye, 2007 I Still 3 Video projection, Pinakothek Der Moderne, Münich I © David Claerbout.

David Claerbout | Kindergarten Antonio Sant'Elia, 1932 | Video projection, Pinakothek Der Moderne, Münich I © David Claerbout.

Pinakothek der Moderne
Barer Strasse 40,
+ 49 089-23805-360
Münich
David Claerbout
October 1, 2010-January 9, 2011

"The triangle of continuity is composed of the past, present and future. I attempt to capture these three elements on the same plane. In my videos I try to create an awareness for the history of an image, its position in the present
and the meaning the future could hold."

— David Claerbout

Time is the central theme in the oeuvre of the Belgian David Claerbout, who is among the best-known video artists of his generation. In the past few years in particular, major solo exhibitions of his work have been held in Europe (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; De Pont, Tilburg) and North America (MIT, Cambridge; Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver). In his visually overwhelming works Claerbout experiments both with photographs he has found, often of a historical nature, as well as with reconstructed images and his own film material. In a new form of imagery that transcends the boundaries between the media of photography and film, he almost imperceptibly adds movement to static pictures while bringing film footage virtually to a standstill. Claerbout often focuses on unspectacular everyday occurrences lasting a few seconds or minutes which he then condenses into impressive parables about the meaning of life and the transience of time. At the same time, his technically complex works question the perception and accuracy of images in the light of our increasingly digitalised world.

To mark the recent acquisition of two works by the artist for the Sammlung Moderne Kunst, the exhibition includes three new space-filling installations created in the past few years. The presentation is complemented by two early works in black and white. The exhibition is being devised in close cooperation with David Claerbout and his studio.

David Claerbout, born in 1969 in Kortrijk, studied at the Nationaal Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp from 1992 until 1995, and in 1996 at the Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunst in Amsterdam. He spent 2002 in Berlin on a DAAD grant. He has participated in a number of international exhibitions and, among other shows, will be represented at the São Paulo Art Biennial in 2010. David Claerbout lives and works in Antwerp and Berlin). Further information can be found at: www.davidclaerbout.com.

David Claerbout | Riverside, 2009 I Still boy 49 Video installation, Courtesy David Claerbout and galleries Hauser & Wirth, Yvon Lambert, Micheline Szqajcer, Rüdiger Schöttle, Jörg Johnen, © David Claerbout.

David Claerbout | Shadow Piece, 2005 I Still 37 Video projection, Courtesy Sammlung Goetz, Münich I © David Claerbout.

David Claerbout, Arena, 2007.

David Claerbout: Blurring Perceptions of What is Still and What Moves

David Claerbout, Bordeaux Piece, 2004.

David Claerbout, The Algiers' Sections of a Happy Moment, 2008.

David Claerbout, Dancing Couples, 2008.

David Claerbout, Rocking Chair, 2003.

Kunstmuseum St. Gallen
Museumstrasse 32
+41.71.242 06 71
St.Gallen
David Claerbout
After the Quiet
May 24-August 31, 2008

Seit Mitte der neunziger Jahre hat der belgische Künstler David Claerbout ein konsequentes künstlerisches Werk von erstaunlicher Bildkraft entwickelt, das dank zahlreicher Ausstellungen international breit wahrgenommen wird und nun im Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, erstmals in einer umfangreichen Einzelpräsentation in der Schweiz, zu sehen ist.

Claerbouts multimediales Schaffen und sein künstlerischer Ansatz – gleichsam zwischen den Medien – zielen auf eine grundlegende Reflexion über die (bildnerischen) Medien, ihre historischen Traditionen und Wertigkeiten sowie den ihnen eigenen Status als Bild. Dabei wird in den konzisen Arbeiten die Zeit zur entscheidenden Dimension der Wahrnehmung vermeintlich unbewegter Bilder. Raffiniert spielt der Künstler mit den Ausformungen des Zeitlichen im Bild, seinen möglichen Dehnungen und Verdichtungen zwischen Dauer und Moment. Dabei versteht er es, Zeit als eine dem Bild inhärente Dimension in immer wieder überraschender Weise zu formen, zu modulieren und zu verlangsamen, weshalb er sozusagen als der „Entschleunigungskünstler“ der Gegenwart wahrgenommen wird: „Der Triangel von Dauer ist einer von Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft. Ich versuche, diese drei Elemente auf derselben Oberfläche zu erfassen. Ich versuche, in den Videoarbeiten ein Bewusstsein zu erlangen von der Vergangenheit des Bildes, seiner Gegenwart und was es in Zukunft bedeuten könnte.“ (David Claerbout)

So bildete seine eindrückliche Videoinstallation Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho (reconstruction after Hiromichi Mine) den gedanklichen Ausgangspunkt und das inhaltliche Zentrum der Ausstellung Im Auge des Zyklons / In the Eye of the Storm, die letzten Sommer im Kunstmuseum St.Gallen zu sehen war. In der 2001 entstandenen Arbeit bezieht sich Claerbout auf eine historische Fotografie des Reporters Hiromichi Mine, der im Vietnamkrieg ein U.S.-Transportflugzeug aufgenommen hatte, das durch „friendly fire“ von eigenen Truppen abgeschossen wurde. Festgehalten ist der Augenblick, in dem das Flugzeug über dem Stützpunkt abstürzt. Genau an diesem Punkt setzt Claerbouts subtiler Transformationsprozess des S/W-Originals ein. Er hat dieses am Computer mit eigenen Aufnahmen vom Ort des Geschehens verbunden und animiert – mit dem Ziel einer Verschiebung der Wahrnehmung, weg vom Vordergründigen der Aktion hin, zu langsamen Veränderungen des Lichts und damit zu wiederkehrenden Phänomenen der Natur. Es geht dem Künstler also nicht um ein Historienbild, sondern um das Modulieren von Zeit in der Bespiegelung von bewegten und unbewegten Bildtraditionen.

Dies geschieht in den vordergründig so ruhigen Sequenzen von scheinbar alltäglichen Begebenheiten mittels aufwändiger digitaler Bildmanipulation. Aus analogen Bildern erschafft Claerbout eindrückliche Videoarbeiten und digitale „Diapräsentationen“, in denen sich die traditionellen Bildmedien bespiegeln und damit ihren eigenen Status permanent in Frage stellen. Im Zeitalter digitaler Bildverarbeitung geht es indes weniger um eine neue Nutzung der traditionellen Bildgattungen als vielmehr um einen grundlegend anderen Zugriff auf Bilddaten und deren subtile Transformationen.

Mit genauso spektakulären wie vielschichtigen Videoarbeiten ist der 1969 in Kortrijk geborene und heute in Antwerpen lebende David Claerbout in den vergangenen Jahren prominent hervorgetreten, wie Einzelausstellungen in bedeutenden Institutionen, u. a. 2002 im Kunstverein Hannover, 2003 im Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, oder 2004 im Lenbachhaus, München, sowie zahlreiche Ausstellungsbeteiligungen, u.a. an der 2. Berlin Biennale, 2001, oder der Taipei Biennale, 2004, belegen. Als erstes Schweizer Museum präsentiert das Kunstmuseum St.Gallen eine grosse Einzelausstellung, die neben bekannten Videoarbeiten wie The Stack (2002), Rocking Chair ( 2003) oder Bordeaux Piece (2004) eine Reihe aktueller Werke zeigen wird.

David Claerbout, The Stack, 2002.

Bordeaux Piece, 2004, Installation (video-projection), colour, two channel audio (2 speakers and headphones), 13 hours, 43’, Collection Centre Pompidou, Nouveaux Médias, Paris.

Five Pieces, Navigating a Universe between Moving and Still Images

Bordeaux Piece, 2004, Installation (video-projection), colour, two channel audio (2 speakers and headphones),
13 hours, 43’, Collection Centre Pompidou, Nouveaux Médias, Paris.

Bordeaux Piece, 2004, Installation (video-projection), colour, two channel audio (2 speakers and headphones), 13 hours, 43’, Collection Centre Pompidou, Nouveaux Médias, Paris.

Bordeaux Piece, 2004, Installation (video-projection), colour, two channel audio (2 speakers and headphones),
13 hours, 43’, Collection Centre Pompidou, Nouveaux Médias, Paris.

Sections of a Happy Moment, 2007, Single channel video-projection, black and white, stereo audio, 26’, Courtesy
Galerie Yvon Lambert, Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Hauser and Wirth.

Bordeaux Piece, 2004, Installation (video-projection), colour, two channel audio (2 speakers and headphones),
13 hours, 43’, Collection Centre Pompidou, Nouveaux Médias, Paris.

Shadow piece, 2005, Video-projection, black and white, stereo audio, 30’, Collection Fondation de Pont, Tilburg.

Centre Pompidou
Place Georges Pompidou
+33 (0)1 44 78 12 33
Paris
Espace 315, Level L
David Claerbout
October 3-January 7, 2008

Belgian David Claerbout (born in Courtrai in 1969) blurs the line between the still and the moving image, digitally manipulating analog images to create works that invite a reconsideration both of the image and of our perceptions of space and time.

Since 1996, Claerbout's works have navigated between the still and the moving image, between photographic and digital techniques. Inspired both by phenomenology and by Gilles Deleuze's writings on The Time-Image and The Movement-Image (1983), he has developed a photography in movement, a "moving still" — into which, since 2004, he has introduced narrative elements.

The 300-square-metre exhibition space is shared by five projected works: The Stack, 2002, Bordeaux Piece, 2004, and Shadow Piece, 2005,together with two new works, Sections of a Happy Moment and Long Goodbye, both 2007. Filmed in architectural settings representative of modern culture and the contemporary urban context, they explore the passage of time and the unfolding of space.

Bordeaux Piece — acquired by the Centre Pompidou for the collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne — thus makes use of a magnificent villa on the outskirts of Bordeaux as a tool for a conceptual approach to space-time, a minutely introspective examination of time in a deconstructed space.

Visitors are invited to take their time in moving through the specially designed exhibition space, its half-light permitting a liberty forbidden in the cinema and allowing a dialogue to emerge between the works.

“In many of my works over the past ten years both time and space have developed into anchors of my videographic production. In a mode of production where photographic reality is increasingly preconceived, filmic duration seems to be the last man standing from an ‘analogue’ past.

"Occupied with both the artificiality and flatness of anything on screen or print, I have often taken recourse to architectural photography as a way of defining space in what I would call the terrible flatness of film."

The exhibition will be accompanied by a bilingual catalogue in French and English, jointly published with the MIT List Center of Cambridge, and the De Pont Foundation, Tilburg, with essays by Françoise Parfait, Dirk Snauwaert and Christine Van Assche, together with numerous reproductions as well as preparatory drawings and scenarios.

A Discussion of the Work
The Stack, 2002, Single channel video-projection, colour, silent, 36’, Collection Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, SMAK, Gent.

A homeless sleeper is hidden in the foreground of the composition, while behind him the last beams of a setting sun are pooring through a jungle of concrete pillars.

For this piece I had taken on a subject (poverty, homelessness) which I usually wouldn’t touch, because of its specificity, and because it would easily be interpreted as social critique. One could say that showing ‘poverty’, social misery, is almost putting a stigma on a composition or an artwork by the very subject, and obliging the maker of the work to take a stand or a direction. Another strategy would be to use cynicism as equally eroding every possibility for multiple interpretations.

When I first had the idea to make this piece, I was rather thinking about the fact that the sun, the day, or simply put time evolving are elements that do not care about a subject. Realizing this took away my initial hesitation and shyness, I wanted to amputate the forcibly ‘critical’ away from the ‘social’. In other words: time (a role , here performed by the sun during a 36 minute sunset) does not care about what is critical, about what is problematic, about what is exposed and whether it is correct to expose it or not.

All by all it is just the character of the sun (usually connotated as warm, well doing) that is reversed into a neutral light source (the sun losing it’s connotations with the natural and becoming electrical, abstract.) The same accounts for the composition of the bridges (a clear buffer in between the homeless sleeper and the sun). The strong composition demands so much attention that it looks as if this is what the work is about: a composition, a framing. The subject has become a detail (I am thinking about the history -or mythology painter, who in reality loves depicting the landscape more than the story).

I hope that in ‘the stack’ there is a simultaneous and continuous but unclear and undecided narrative between the theatrical (the subject) and the everyday (the evolving of the light of the day.)

— David Claerbout

Bordeaux Piece, 2004, Installation (video-projection), colour, two channel audio (2 speakers and headphones), 13hours, 43’, Collection Centre Pompidou, Nouveaux Médias, Paris.

Exactly the same sequence of short scenes about 11 minutes has been recorded up to 68 times on the same setting, with all takes identical to each other, but shot at different times during one single day, so that only the light conditions in each sequence visibly change.

The camera, the dialogues, directing, sound and editing are following the rules of classical movie telling. Al though the dialogues are without content and empty and the characters remain superficial we recognize the drama of two men who rival over a woman. This identical dialogue over a "ménage à trois" is being repeated continuously on a defined and limited stage. The insistent repeating of the short drama denies not only conventional narrative rules, it is even more the opposite of narration.

The dialogues can only be followed by head-phones, whereas the background sound of the nature is being heard over loudspeakers. Thus two distinguishable, but intertwined spaces emerge: the outside world of the background with the visually, cyclic unfolding time and the inner world of the narration, of the dialogue and the touchable.

David Claerbout is, as in most of his work, exploring the different natures of time : the video is a thorough reflection on what the artist would define as a “deep time”, a dimension beyond the one we measure with common instruments, a dimension which is not manipulated by the editing.

Claerbout has ironically chosen to implement this story into a contemporary "amnesic" architecture to make aware of the phenomenon of time. There is no space in between to the past. The architecture is recent. It's a location with a very short past and on first glance without history.

Thus the scene becomes less and less credible, yet we continue to watch — fascinated with our own folly-waiting for the climax or the denouement that will never come. Ultimately, Claerbout’s evocative investigation takes us outside of time.

— Dirk Snauwaert
(catalog Etwas von Etawas,
Abstrakte Kunst, 2005)

Shadow piece, 2005, Video-projection, black and white, stereo audio, 30’, Collection Fondation de Pont, Tilburg.

The video shows a street scene, filmed from within a vast entrance hall of an office building to the outside of a sunlit street/place. Only the cast shadows of the passers-by transgress through the huge glass doors of the closed building when they try to open its doors. The view is directed from a spiral metal staircase onto the entrance hall and the outside. The architecture is modernistic, huge frontal glass doors, polished marble entrance floor of the hall and metal staircase.

The idea of seclusion, of the impossibility is linked with the extreme neatness and harmony of the composition which is drawn to a sort of ideal. It is an image of a past time, a kind of closure. This closure in time is made apparent in the closure of the framed image, cuts of the street in the upper part and the entrance hall in the lower part. Only the shadows of the passers-by manage to transgress its limits. One gets the impression of the normal time passing in the upper part of the image with the street activity, though only recognizable by shadows, whereas the lower part of the image reminds of a still photo, only from time to time disturbed by the cast shadow of a person trying to open the doors.

— David Claerbout

Sections of a Happy Moment, 2007, Single channel video-projection, black and white, stereo audio, 26’, Courtesy Galerie Yvon Lambert, Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Hauser and Wirth.

It depicts a single moment in the life of a Chinese family on a sunlit square, surrounded by clean social housing. The figures, grouped in a circular composition around a ball hanging in mid-air, have been caught in an intimate family moment by a multitude of photo cameras.The cameras' eyes capture from an eagles perspective, from beneath, from all sides, and distances one moment, one split second.

This image consolidates the very volatile moment in a very sculptural composition. The architecture contrasts with the familiar and intimate group of people as it is foremost architecture of anonymity and cool modernism. Perhaps due to extreme close ups and intimacy of the images those people cannot be ignored. More generally this is a work that negotiates between human intimacy and abstraction.

The photographic recording (slideshow) of the spontaneity of the family members, is gradually and terribly slowly taken down to a close-up control over their lives. In other words, what appears to be a propagandistic moment in a happy life turns out to be controlled from every angle. This work is about the unease in identifying a new global partner (how can Chinese have an intimate life?')

As often in David Claerbout’s work duration is an important tool for altering what we see, unlocking the flow of time from a fixed situation. Despites fragmentation there is continuity, or is it that despite continuity everything is fragmented?

Ironically, the projection is accompanied by a piano solo, new age, easy listening music, recognisable by “everybody”, from China to west.

— David Claerbout

Untitled (Long Goodbye), 2007, In progress, Single channel video-projection, colour, silent, Courtesy Galerie Yvon Lambert, Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Hauser and Wirth.

The work Untitled (Long Goodbye) is a video study of one movement that is performed by a female protagonist in her 40ties, during a sunset observed and registered by a single ultra-slow backward camera movement: the woman comes out of the open front door, steps onto the terrace, looks into the camera, smiles, and waves goodbye.

This simple, universal gesture thus followed by specific key moments of the camera movement becomes charged with a strong narrative content.

The very moment when the woman notices the camera, she looks into it, as if she is looking to the spectator, triggering the camera to start its backward movement. The camera withdraws very slowly as if it were an embarrassed onlooker caught during the act of voyeurism.

The duration of this backward travel movement is between 30 and 45 minutes long.

The video starts with a close to medium frame of the front door, only revealing a small part of the house and its surroundings. As the camera is slowly moving backward, the spectator will sense time passing slowly, even more reinforced by the time of the day when the last rays of sunlight fade into the total darkness of a night on the countryside. The more the camera retreats while seeking shelter, the more it reveals the splendor of the house, the terrace, the trees, but also the darker it gets, thus creating a deep yearning for this beautiful place that will remain out of reach for the beholder, as the night falls.

When the work is installed for a public presentation, the end of the video should coincide with total darkness
in the video room.

— David Claerbout

Shadow piece, 2005, Video-projection, black and white, stereo audio, 30’, Collection Fondation de Pont, Tilburg.