Not Like or Unlike Anything: David O’Kane’s Repetitions and Differences.
Declan Long
1.
The slightest camera movement was a profound shift in space and time but the camera was not moving now. Anthony Perkins is turning his head. It was like whole numbers. The man could count the gradations in the movement of Anthony Perkins' head. Anthony Perkins turns his head in five incremental moments rather than one continuous motion. It was like bricks in a wall, clearly countable, not like the flight of an arrow or a bird. Then again it was not like or unlike anything. Anthony Perkins' head swiveling over time on his long thin neck. (Don DeLillo, Point Omega, 2010, p.5)
Strange, extreme, unnatural movement. Out-of-the-ordinary and out-of-the-blue slowness. The fictional narrator of Don DeLillo’s Point Omega finds himself — or loses himself — experiencing a new sense of time and motion while watching the real-life artwork 24 Hour Psycho by Douglas Gordon at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The equally real-life DeLillo invents a fictional character to describe an actual encounter with a work of cinematic fiction that has been transformed into a new form of empirically apprehended visual fact. Within the steady introspective drift of novelistic narration, we are offered artfully meandering perspectives on Gordon’s stretched-out, ultra slo-mo rendering of Alfred Hitchcock’s recognisably compelling film images — an installation that re-stages the iconic original with all customary suspense and drama drained away.
In Gordon’s work, the Psycho story is stricken into near-stasis over its extended twenty-four hour duration, its component images seemingly segregated as discretely sequenced moments rather than realised — and released — as pure, appreciable, believable motion. Of course, in its further literary restaging in DeLillo’s novel, we cannot quite be sure of what is real and unreal about the observations and sensations that are being detailed. But we can at least accept that time itself has been radically distended, and that, consequently, the affective specificities of cinematic movement have been newly intensified.
Within DeLillo’s deliberate back and forth relay between fact and fiction, an uncertain space is created to account for the experience of the unfamiliar — a freakish filmic unfamiliarity that is, in a classically uncanny manner, grounded in expectations of the familiar. DeLillo creates unsteady literary ground upon which to gauge the anxieties of encountering a convincingly representational moving-picture image-world on new and disconcerting terms: as a series of enthralling singularities, as gripping momentary assertions of visual distinction and disconnection. And one thing that perhaps happens within such uneasy artistic space — one potential that emerges — might be that what becomes available is a fresh apprehension of how the visual world is captured and contained by technologies of perception. Perception is altered, intensified and opened-up through unorthodox manipulations of the medium of representation.
2.
He stood and looked. In the time it took for Anthony Perkins to turn his head, there seemed to flow an array of ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things, or maybe he was seeing too much. But it was impossible to see too much. The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. This was the point. To see what's here, finally to look and to know you're looking, to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion. (Point Omega, pp.5-6)
A recent series of twenty-four paintings by David O’Kane concentrates not on the turning of a head, but on a visual process of circling around a head, of observing a single, seated figure throughout a complete 360-degree movement. The series is composed of quite small, concentrated portraits showing the solitary figure in a fixed position, each time seen from a precise point on a circumference of viewing. (DeLillo’s narrator, incidentally, makes a point of walking around the Psycho screen several times: “he was able to stand at various angles … he walked backwards looking always, at the screen.”) Presented together, the paintings look like a collection of beautifully simple ‘stills’: each one a distinct, restrained reflection on nothing more than a blonde boy, wearing a red jumper, against a plain blue background. Posed and ‘paused’, they appear to break down movement, and the movement of a point of view, into discrete parts.
Like 24 Hour Psycho, they suggest stalled, sequenced moments in time, bringing new static detail to an ongoing, flowing transition from one point to another. The number of paintings in the series is of course equal in number to the hours of Gordon’s Psycho (and it is perhaps worth noting that in the past O’Kane has made work that directly alludes to Hitchcock’s film) but it is also the number of images identified by Eadweard Muybridge as that which, when sequenced, produces an illusion of movement. And so rather than only representing movement that has been somehow ‘captured’ — an after-the-fact form of imagined painterly documentation— these paintings are also, obviously and crucially, to be understood as preparatory.
Rather than resulting from a slowing of time, they are executed as stills for an animation; and as such they methodically open the static painterly image up to the possibility of temporal progression. These are paintings that collectively propose the pretence of actual action. Produced through the painstaking process of slowly building up a painting — mark by precise mark — they are set up for a flick-book style of movement, enabling a simultaneously mundane and magical transformation of pictorial stasis into fast-moving flux. O’Kane’s series commits to repetitive close-looking: considering a subject again and again from different perspectives — and at the same time, it allies itself with a form (animation) in which concentration on a single image is impossible. In so doing it also seems to present paradoxes and puzzles about pictures and their place in time and space — imagining paintings that ‘tremble’ in time, placed without definition between before and after, between one moment and another, and between this position and that.
3.
Then again it was not like or unlike anything…it [engaged] the individual at a depth beyond the usual assumptions, the things he supposes and presumes and takes for granted. (Don DeLillo, Point Omega, pp.5-7)
Stillness and movement, now and then, one place and another, fact and fiction: such binaries are regularly invoked — and revoked — in David O’Kane’s paintings. There is a perpetual negotiation between possibilities of occupying space and time, between possibilities of perceiving and verifying the world through art; but the outcomes of this process are purposefully hard to fathom. We follow strands of the familiar within situations of unfamiliar, uncertain reality.
The title of the 2014 painting The Zoetrope, points to one of the central polarities central to O’Kane’s art: between the still and the moving image. But it does not stabilise in any readily legible way as a meditation on such conditions. A zoetrope is, of course, a pre-cinematic cylindrical animation machine, spinning a series of still images into apparently fluid motion. It is a contained space into which we look and find one form of (mechanical) motion creating another (visual) form of motion. And though there is a circular, allusively zoetropic arrangement at the centre of O’Kane’s picture — a series of small transparent panes facing another solitary figure — he stages it in relation to a diverse set of other imaging, looking and representing devices. In this way, as we look into the painting’s peculiar, somewhat uncanny world, a whole series of ideas and themes seem to be spinning before us, setting our own minds spinning too, unsteadying our efforts to ground the work in any useful assumptions, suppositions and presumptions.
The painting is set in the corner of a grand room. To the left is a window, to the right a mirror. Each opens out the mise-en-scene, but in different and ambiguous ways. The window implies a view outwards, but in fact provides none. The mirror implies only reflection, but it offers more of an ‘expanded’ view than the window. The painting’s central figure — another blonde boy in a red top, a near-but-not-quite repetition of the character we see in other work — is at once placed only within the ‘open’ space of the room’s corner (we see two walls in front but none behind) and constrained within two layered and bounded zones: the circle of standing glass panes and a floor diagram below that, for one reason or another, appears to mark out a set of territorial limits or architectural dimensions.
Everything in this painting — as with so many of O’Kane’s compellingly enigmatic scenarios — is neither one thing nor another. A chalkboard on the facing wall presents a diagram that describes the human eye’s capacity for vision; and yet, overlapping with this pictorial invocation of scientific clarity, we see a series of loose strands tumbling from a hanging screen on which the pattern of a labyrinth is emerging. There is, then, a simultaneous, contradictory sense both of the limits of perception and of expanded imaginative and spatial possibility. And with his back to us, the central figure in the picture becomes our uneasy avatar. He, like each of us viewing this and other related paintings, is a character in an intricate interpretative drama, fully immersed in a meticulously realised but forever uncertain world. As we enter the milieu of O’Kane’s paintings, we become uniquely located in time and space, but we are also imaginatively unfixed and free — our minds endlessly in motion.
Declan Long
2014