This week\u2019s returning author, Marshall Reese, is an artist working in new technologies, video, installations, artists books and limited editions. He has worked in collaboration with Nora Ligorano as LigoranoReese for over two decades.<\/em><\/p>\n
This blog post is part of periodic series from Reese that focuses on \u201coutsider archivists,\u201d people who highlight the tensions between traditional and born-digital archives and the transition between the two. Mnemosyne is the Greek goddess of memory, the mother of the nine muses. Her significance only seems to grow as we externalize more and more of information, data, <\/em>and records.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n
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With the plethora of digital devices that saturate our lives today, it\u2019s hard to imagine that there was a time, not so long ago, when seeing yourself, your family, or friends on an electronic screen was unfathomable. When artists began working in video in the early 1970\u2019s, the closest model of what video art images could look like was broadcast television. The discourse of breaking those norms and the dynamics to propose video as a distinct art form animated the field for many years.<\/span><\/p>\n
Few artists looked at the medium, though, in an intimate way. Joan Logue is one of them. Her ongoing five decades practice of video portraiture, worthy of much greater acknowledgement, has been preparing us for the world we live in now; a world of shared intimacy that we reveal of ourselves in moving images and stills privately and publicly on social media and in selfies.<\/span><\/p>\n
I first met Joan and saw her video portraits at the San Sebastian Video Festival in Spain in 1984. Joan\u2019s portraits moved, breathed and lived. Her subjects looked into her camera, and peered out to reveal a presence and sense of being far more alive than had they been captured in still frames as a painting or photograph. The portraits of Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Robert Ashley, Nam June Paik, George Lewis and many others (dating from 1981-82) that she screened at the festival clearly related to television and commercials.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
30-60 seconds in length, they were often aired as interstitial breaks on PBS\u2019 <\/span>Alive from Off Center<\/span><\/a> and on European television. They were almost commercials except instead of advertising products, they featured contemporary artists and performers.<\/span><\/p>\n
Joan\u2019s approach to portraiture is expansive, taking in concepts of place and time. It makes sense to me that she began her groundbreaking work in West Africa in the early 1970\u2019s. We spoke by phone about her work and how she\u2019s preparing her collection soon to be acquired by the Centre Pompidou and <\/span>Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France<\/span> in Paris. (In itself, a groundbreaking arrangement between the institutions as well as testament to the significance of her work.)<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n I was teaching video in a little village on the border of Sierra Leone and Liberia to men and women.\u00a0<\/span><\/i>One day, while cleaning the dust from my portapak camera, preparing for the day\u2019s shoot, my camera was pointing out the window and there was this young child standing in front of my window. He knew that I was always carrying my camera around and he saw the camera and he saw me. <\/span><\/i>He was going to duck below the window. And I motioned to him to stay \u2013 \u2018No, no. Don\u2019t move, just stay there.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n It was then I realized what I was seeing on the boy\u2019s face in the video, you saw everything. It was the real portrait because you saw something beneath his smiling face. You actually saw the whole person without the facade! <\/span><\/i>And I thought this is way better than any still photograph. And that\u2019s when I started making video portraits.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
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Sense of place is significant in understanding Logue\u2019s work. She makes not only moving portraits of people but also portraits of place. Her series on fishermen in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Spring Street shopkeepers in Soho, and villagers in Brittany, France capture her subjects pursuing their daily lives. There\u2019s a quotidian sense and a sense of being centered.<\/span><\/p>\n
Returning to California after Africa, Joan began doing video portraits of artists.<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n I would go to their studio. Ed Ruscha\u2019s studio or Diebenkorn\u2019s studio. I started in Judy Chicago\u2019s. I would go and shoot them in their environment. <\/span><\/i>Since they were all painters they understood the idea of silence, they understood when I asked them not to talk, This was in 1976, video art wasn\u2019t what it is now, it was new and the equipment was heavy and very expensive.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
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On another level, Logue\u2019s portraits are much more than representations. They\u2019re feedback loops. They\u2019re not just a recording of the subject, because the artist is also present in the making of it. Joan sits across from her subject next to her camera in silence. Her portraits are a silent meditation, a wordless conversation between two people.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n My whole premise was that the silence was much stronger than the words. You actually got a sense of the person\u2019s presence, who they were and how they felt.\u00a0<\/span><\/i>You don\u2019t have an opportunity to sit with somebody in silence because everybody wants to fill that space with words. It\u2019s difficult to be in silence with someone. In a way I\u2019m as exposed as they are.\u00a0<\/span><\/i>When two people are confronted with silence, it\u2019s like an acceptance of each other. You\u2019re not arguing, you\u2019re not schmoozing. The viewer and the sitter become one, because you both read each other.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Once you start a silent portrait, you feel the presence of the person and then the sitter kind of disappears into their head. You can see it in the portrait.\u00a0<\/span><\/i>Painters totally understood this. Whereas for writers it\u2019s hard for them to, you know, not want to talk.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
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My favorite video portraits Joan created are those of John Cage. There are three: a short one and two longer ones. Her use of silence in her work, in fact, is how they met.<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n I was living at 110 Mercer Street in Soho where many of us lived at the time, Nam June, <\/span><\/i>Shikego Kubota, Mary Beth Edelson, Yoshi Wada.\u00a0<\/span><\/i>And we didn\u2019t have mailboxes. Everybody threw their mail on the staircase and periodically sorted through them to find theirs.\u00a0<\/span><\/i>I got this, John used to call them mailagrams. <\/span><\/i>A \u201cmailagram\u201d from John Cage, was a take off on a telegram but this was John\u2019s form of letter writing, a kind of short form he had printed to answer his correspondence.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n John had sent me one and said, \u2018Well, I heard you\u2019re doing work in silence. I would like to talk to you.\u2019 Everybody in the building knew this from going through the mail and called me, \u2018Did you see, you got this thing from John?\u2019 I said, \u2018Yeah. Yeah.\u2019 <\/span><\/i>So I called him and he invited me over and we talked about silence. I asked him if he would do a portrait with me. And he said, \u2018Yes\u2019. So that was in 1979. <\/span><\/i>I did one 30 second portrait of John Cage and I did two longer portraits, all silent portraits.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
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My fondest memory as a video editor for Standby<\/a> is remastering Joan\u2019s portrait of John Cage in the 1990\u2019s. She had shot Cage on analogue videotape and we were in the process of transferring his portrait to digital video. It was late at night and we\u2019d spent some time working together. At the end of the edit session I recall searching for the end frame of his video to fade out. And I couldn\u2019t find it! There was no timecode number.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
And then, trying to match the frame, I remember focusing intently on the video of Cage\u2019s face, searching for some expressive change, for an end frame. To observe his incredible presence so intimately went far beyond the idea of traditional portraiture. I realized that the same thing that happened to Joan when she filmed her subjects was happening to me as the editor.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
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Joan Logue\u2019s Video Portraits<\/h4>\n
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