Joel Schlemowitz views the work of Jeremy Slater
Bradley Eros’s “e.p.i.c.” project paired Jeremy Slater and me. The concept was a private screening with an audience of one: “extreme private intimate cinema.” We arrange the single-person-audience screenings on a Sunday and on Tuesday.
Sauntered from the G train stop in Williamsburg towards Jeremy’s place, a loft space in the back of a gallery.
We’d been introduced to each other by my wife Murata over at Phill Niblock’s place, but I didn’t think we’d ever seen each other’s work. Actually, Jeremy had seen one of my films at Mike Park’s New Vision Cinema.
While Jeremy went to transfer some of the works that we were going to watch I introduced myself to the cat.
Jeremy does experimental music and sound and video. Works of his can be seen and heard at:
I was very intrigued by Jeremy’s former job working in the coloring department of a comic book publisher. Was it ever the case that some comic book colorist practiced secret subversion by making the colors wrong on purpose or something like that? Jeremy didn’t know of anything first hand. But he had once heard of a comic book colorist who discreetly snuck his girlfriend’s name into a comic book through the coloring process, much like Hirschfield’s “Nina.”
The works that Jeremy screened for me were in a roughly chronological order. The earliest piece being “FLIKERESQ” utilizing the optical properties of the camera lens to create out-of-focus “circles of confusion” that seemed like gently floating amoeba viewed through a microscope. We then looked at a version of the same piece with processed color, where Jeremy had “performed” the colors on an Amiga computer. What with the advances in technology Jeremy and I chatted about how people will nowadays pick up a laptop and download some VJ freeware that can do a gazillion fancy things to the image. But do they know anything of the archaic and primitive world that was the “Amiga computer?” And those technologies that seem of some distant past like half inch black-and-white video recorded reel-to-reel tape on Sony Portapak. Wire recording? 78 records? (we’ll come back to this later, I’m sure).
Other early pieces straddled the different modes of presentation. “MOTHERBOARD CITY” a video piece for “live” performance with music and visuals from when the term “VJ” was newly minted. And “( )” which took the form of different permutations, including an interactive CD-ROM, and an installation piece, using slabs of old, worn down barn-wood as foot-pedals to activate the sounds and visuals. The installation itself wasn’t there for us to see, just some photos. The foot-pedals had been ingeniously constructed by disassembling a computer keyboard and soldering a length wire from the keyboard’s circuit board to switches put under the pedals.
Next we looked at “AMB_1 (EV BLUR).” The image, a blur of shifting shapes, the lens racked completely out-of-focus, with bright dapples of reflected light and the movements within the blur. The image shifting and changing: momentary glints of brightness abstract enough to be barely recognizable as the sunlight reflected on car windows, shapeless dark blotches lurching horizontally across the image which only gave away their identity as people passing on the sidewalk by a subtle qualities of human movement.
The “EV” stood for “East Village” which tied the geographically ambiguous blur to a specificity of place, as if this were not just any blur we were seeing, but a specifically “East Village” blur. (Leaving us wondering how a Murray Hill blur or a Hell’s Kitchen blur would bring their own unique stamp of abstraction as distinct from an East Village blur). I later regretted that when it was my turn to show Jeremy some of my works it hadn’t occurred to me to show my little film portrait of “Avenue A without a lens.”
“MANIC CHINATOWN BICYCLE” also a single unedited sequence, speeds through the city streets as manically as the titles suggests, slowing down now and again, only when the traffic light turns red, to give a glimpse in the distance of the Empire State Building’s silvery illumination bright in the fading light.
We viewed two works that Jeremy shot in Japan “KANJISCROLL” a study of neon lights, and “UENO RAIN (ENJUKU)” a nocturnal study of an of steel shuttered storefronts below an elevated railroad. The soundtrack of the rain pinging on discarded empty beer cans while produced by natural happenstance seemed almost to be a percussive musical performance.
Two pieces produced at the Experimental Television Center in upstate New York, “SUSQUEHANNAICEFLOEWOBL (INCENSE AND TEA)” and “PACHINKOBWOBL (RESOLUTION)” used video processing with the Center’s old-school analog video processors. The “Wobulator” and the “Dave Jones colorizer.” Jeremy made a passing remark about the latter of these two pieces: “When we were producing this piece it seemed like the studio was haunted.” Ah, this was interesting. And indeed, the video’s filmy spider web strands of light against the darkness had an eerie sensation of an ectoplasmic apparition.
The briefest piece, “FOR LOVE LIGHT TREES,” four images. It made me think of the three-image films that Julius Ziz had programmed at Anthology back in the 1990s. Of course, this little four-image film had one-too-many images for the three-image trope, but a charming piece in all its acute brevity.
The last work screened by Jeremy was “WILLIAMSBURG<>D.U.M.B.O.” A nocturnal portrait of the two Brooklyn neighborhoods superimposed, but also an evocation of sensations and impressions of the rainy night shot in constant movement through the window of a car. The reflections of light in the glistening beads of rain on the glass of the car window: the image filled with a spangle of bright golden circles against the purple-tinged darkness of the city night. The landscape of industrial buildings and warehouses of Williamsburg and D.U.M.B.O. The sparkling patterns of golden light in the drops of rain seemed phantasmagoric will-o’-wisps. The two neighborhoods merged together through superimposition giving both environments a gauzy transparency.
Working in sound and performing music, Jeremy’s soundtracks were always carefully attuned to the visuals. I imagined how someone who has never made a film or video, and therefore having faced the challenges of using sound and music, might see these works and be puzzled as to why a musician would have soundtracks which were not more conspicuous? The use of sound was often understated, but the filmmaking experience and the first-hand challenges of using sound helped answer this question, even without asking Jeremy. Add a piece of music to an image and suddenly the beat of the performance usurps the film and overpowers the visual rhythms. The image, inexplicably sapped of its visual power, is just dancing to the music. There is a reason why Brakhage made so many films to be shown entirely silent. When the agenda of the piece calls for a visual rhythm that isn’t drowned out by the soundtrack, the alternative to going entirely silent is to use sound in a manner that is subtle and yields to the visuals just enough to let the two have an interplay without one or the other entirely taking over.
I was most intrigued by Jeremy’s works that used out-of-focus as the primary visual element. The earliest work was based around an out-of-focus point of light that became a circle of confusion, or several circles all uniform in size and sometimes overlapping one another like a Venn Diagram. The circle of confusion also brings out hidden qualities of the lens, small dark patches in the uniform circles reveal stray bits of dust on the surface of the glass that are mostly unseen, and usually regarded as imperfections when they are revealed. These spots, often unavoidable as blochy shadows in the circle of confusion, are co-opted into the piece as one of its visual components. The use of out-of-focus threaded its way through the works, starting with “FLIKERESQ”, and continuing with “AMB_1 (EV BLUR)” and again with the glittering spray of light reflected in the beads of rain in “WILLIAMSBURG<>D.U.M.B.O.” The camera’s lens, which ostensibly is engineered with great precision for the purpose of sharp and crisp in-focus images, abruptly commandeered for a wholly different visual agenda: the blur. While the visual ambiguity of the blurred image creates images which can be appreciated for their purely non-representational qualities, a certain tension can exist as well in how the image hovers somewhere between the ideal world of the formal and abstract composition, and the physical world of the concrete object. The blur is more like the shadow on the wall than the object itself, half-recognizable and evident as the image-of-the-thing rather than the-thing-itself.
While the out-of-focus image acted as recurring motif, Jeremy’s works also share an economy of imagery, from the single-image tableaux to the diminutive four-shot-film’s haiku-like economy of both imagery and running time. Even the rambling of a bicycle ride or the meandering through Brooklyn streets on a rainy night is utilized for works that neither ramble nor meander: each piece framed within its distinctive and intentionally restrictive palette of sounds and visuals. It was this quality, avoiding of a more collagist hodge-podge approach, that made the works feel connected with the tenets of concision often associated with the short poem.
Perhaps this has something to do with the choice in what I screened for Jeremy? Creating an “e.p.i.c.” dialogue of contrasts through the screenings of his pieces and my pieces by selecting the experimental documentaries with visuals that run amok with the use so many different visual techniques?
Joel Schlemowitz
Brooklyn, NY
2010
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