Pearlville, 2010

PEARLVILLE BY CHRIS CLARKE

Welcome to Pearlville! Alex Pearl’s films are made, or at least provoked, by the artist’s use of crude automata, machines that serve as cameras, props, actors and obstacles. He lets them run wild, stumbling over each other, breaking down and, through their very crudeness, relaying the malfunctions and mistakes of the filming process. They are the antithesis of slickness and, as such, Pearl’s use of such machines poses an intriguing counterpoint to the common assumption of a highly mechanized medium. The constructions seem to pursue spontaneity, expressiveness, happenstance and coincidence in a way that we commonly think of as very human qualities.

I recall reading an article on the filming of Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn, a remake of an earlier Herzog film that seemed to be sold as the director’s latest big chance to break Hollywood. The essay related several complaints by his technical crew (basically studio hands more used to working on big budget features) that the director’s willingness to go into the jungle, camera in hand, wasn’t the way things were done these days. An extract reads:

“These days, film directors typically cocoon themselves, setting up shots by watching a monitor that displays a live feed from the cinematographer's lens; this tells them exactly how a scene will appear onscreen. But Herzog refuses to separate himself from the action: he wants to feel what he's filming. His participatory method struck many crew members as bizarre. 'How can you see the way a shot looks if you're the stand-in?' White later muttered to himself. 'You can't see yourself.'

The fact that Herzog has been making films for more than 40 years didn't shake the collective judgment that he was doing it all wrong. The mood on the set was toxic. Josef Lieck, the first assistant director, said, 'For a man of his age, it's a very... raw talent. It's more like an 18-year-old running into the forest.' A costume designer complained, 'He doesn't know basic things about filmmaking, things that simply make it easier to tell a story. He thinks that these things will undermine his vision, but they won't.' Harry Knapp, an assistant director, said, 'There is a silent war on the set. We're all in a state of shock.' Herzog, for his part, politely ignored the crew's complaints. Zeitlinger explained, 'When making a film, Werner tries to pretend nobody is around but him and the actors.'”

As I mentioned in relation to Rossi’s paintings, the ideal cinematic experience seems to be one that denies or obfuscates any sense of the technical. The crew see Herzog as an anachronism, as someone whose physical presence gets in the way of the shot, who is, at best, unnecessary. And yet his shots always carry the particular idiosyncrasies of a directorial presence; he tests unusual perspectives, immerses himself in the flora of the jungle setting, sees the camera from the point of view of the lost parachutist (or, in his most recent remake of Bad Lieutenant, drops the camera to the vantage point of a wandering alligator).

Is Pearl the artist here then? What the work recalls for me are the makeshift pinhole cameras of the British artist Stephen Pippin, where the actual images, the actual artworks, are secondary to the way they were made. Pippin transformed everyday objects like washing machines into large-format cameras and, while the effects of the mechanism are revealed in the distortions of the photographs, he has effectively turned the machine into a proxy artist. Pearl’s productions suggest an affinity with this way of making, wherein it is not enough to simply designate the object as an artwork, to follow Duchamp in stating that ‘I CHOSE IT’, but rather one can even contract out the practice itself. As in those dystopian nightmares of the Matrix or the fears of nanotechnology, the artist has simply provided the nudge that could one day render his own role irrelevant.

Chris Clarke Artists’ Clinic, Cornerhouse, 2010