PETER DOBILL

ALL WRITINGS - PETER DOBILL / COPYRIGHT 2009 (Unless Otherwise Noted)

Objects can encourage indifference through their lifeless existence – products preserved as remnants to the creative actuality of action.  As such, actions can offer to a viewer something more than an object.

Actions offer the immediate physical presentation of art to the world – an energy exchange between artist and audience.

This energy exchange is the mainline of the action, for beyond retinal perception lies a maximum perception of the senses, an “everything” perceived into the body as if struck by lightning - a totality of overwhelming energy. Within this totality is the power of actions.

Actions can actualize a hyper-realized present state- a piercing clarity that can only subsist in the fleeting interchange of moments between an artist and an audience. The ramifications of this can extend beyond all other visual art forms – an entire range of expression immediately swallowed by the verity of an ephemeral existence, never to return again, much less to a gallery wall.

At their fiercest, actions crystallize as singular moments of abstraction.

This abstraction of reality, an enacting of the surreal, can realize the possibility of subconscious communication, transposing a visual state to one that can receive the totality of an energy state.

Within this, actions propose to a receiver the “actuality of surreality,” transcending conscious existence through the sheer physicality of enacting, elevating a “person” to a “body.”

As a body, the artist loses his own personal, social and political features, returning the body to its highest point: the universal.

The universal body in action can thus communicate in totality, free from the baggage of existence, tapping into a maximum perception for the receiver.

In the end, actions offer life as a pure possibility of expression.

Beyond the action lie the viscera of received images captured on video.

Video – as raw documents of actions (poorly filmed, shaky, hand-held, tedious, visual nightmares) cannot be the standard for which the fire and passion of actions live on. In addition, solely relying on photo representation of actions is an empty aesthetic gesture that both ignores technology and pontificates to a past “code” of representation; what chance is there for expansion if technology is blindly ignored for aesthetic reverence?

The power of video at its peak is its ability to transcend visual “stasis” of representation – it is the greatest opportunity to transform the image of the action into its own visual entity, a complete ascension from the natural death of the action itself into its own autonomous object. No other representation allows the transfer of the real-time elements of actions that define its power.

In realization of this, video representation of actions requires as much in conception as the actions themselves if they are to achieve their ultimate goal: a transcendental object formed from the prima materia of the action itself.

Achieving this type of video is no less dependent on skill as conception – capturing an action in ways that can serve itself as a separate object.

Assessing video requires a total assessing of the action itself – from establishing the visual framing for recording the action to the movement of the cameraman to capture the action. In this sense, the influence of cinema cannot be ignored not only in technical capacity (mise-en-scene, camera angles, lighting, etc.) but also in the internal structure of building the video – a complete sculpting of time.

Improvisation is by no means absent from the process; it is inherent to the process. What cannot be foreseen developing in the action must be able to be captured in reaction to unfolding time.

Actions are bound by linear time itself – the starting and ending of an action occurs as naturally as the rising and setting of the sun – yet its own inherent logic within liner time may not be as clear when viewed later on. In realization of this, the rhythm of the video must reflect the logic of the action, not liner time as directly recorded.

This union of conception of visual and rhythmic elements provides the video a chance to advance itself to the spirit of which the action has been enacted. If successful, its transformation to an autonomous transcendental object is the highest representation of the action itself.

It is within this context does action-video have its place in not only the artist’s work, but as a future of its own form.