farewell to faktura and factories

Image from Farewell to Language 3D (Adieu au langage 3D), Jean-Luc Godard, 2014

 …in French-speaking Switzerland where I live, in the Vaud canton, “Farewell” also means hello…
Jean-Luc Godard in Jean-Luc Godard talks to Canon Professional Network [about his new 3D film Farewell to Language], 2014

Jerry-rigged SLR cameras used to film Godard’s Farewell to Language, 2014.

Bobby Waldrop oversees machinery for spinning yarn at the Parkdale yarn factory in Gaffney, South Carolina on Tuesday, February 12, 2013. NYTCREDIT: Mike Belleme for The New York Times

The ceilings are high and the machines stretch city block after city block — this one tossing around bits of cotton to clean them, that one taking four-millimeter layers from different bales to blend them.

Only infrequently does a person interrupt the automation, mainly because certain tasks are still cheaper if performed by hand — like moving half-finished yarn between machines on forklifts.

…truth be told, labor is not a big ingredient in the manufacturing uptick in the United States, textiles or otherwise. Indeed, the absence of high-paid American workers in the new factories has made the revival possible.

“Most of our costs are power-related,” said Dan Nation, a senior Parkdale executive.
“U.S. Textile Plants Return, With Floors Largely Empty of People,” by Stephanie Clifford, New York Times, September 19, 2013

Varvara Stepanova at her desk,1924, by Alexander Rodchenko

Composition is the contemplative approach of the artist. Technique and Industry have confronted art with the problem of construction as an active process and not reflective. The ‘sanctity’ of a work as a single entity is destroyed. The museum which was the treasury of art is now transformed into an archive.
Varvara Stepanova, text from 5×5=25 exhibition, 1921, Moscow

Compass and Ruler Drawing, 1914-15, Alexander Rodchenko

Thenceforth the picture ceased being a picture and became a painting or an object. The brush gave way to new instruments with which it was convenient and easy and more expedient to work the surface. The brush which had been so indispensable in painting, which transmitted the object and its subtleties became an inadequate and imprecise instrument in the new non-objective painting, and the press, the roller, the drawing pen, the compass replaced it.
Alexander Rodchenko, exhibition pamphlet at the exhibition of the Leftist Federation in Moscow, 1917, cited in Rodchenko, by German Karginov, quoted in “From Faktura to Factography,”  Benjamin Buchloh, October 30, Fall 1984.

Faktura also meant at this point, and not for Rodchenko alone, incorporating the technical means of construction into the work itself and linking them with existing standards of the development of the means of production in society at large.
Benjamin Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography”

Having decided to stop painting in the mid-1970s,  for reasons of historical relevance, I had to devise a transitional medium for stopping, for coping with the anxious loss of familiar habit, but also with the loss of the tactile and olfactory qualities of painting that had been meaningful to me personally. A Winnicot-esque transitional object – a commercial paint-roller – took the place of my brush-bond, so to speak, with white and grey wall paint rolled on horizontal canvases. Once this transitional process had served its purpose, the canvases were thrown out. Had I been familiar with the artists of the Russian revolution, I might not have had to go the route of the roller at all; for those artists, if a transitional medium was needed, the tune of class equity and the death of bourgeois values sufficed as transitional objects. But I was a baby of the cold war, and the revolutionary period had been publicly repressed almost completely during my childhood and young adulthood.

Over the past 35 years, the subject of facture and faktura have intermittently preoccupied me. Not so much its aspects of medium self-referentiality as applied mostly in relation to, as Buchloh points out, European modernist art, but more so a persistent return to thinking about aspects of tactility, of the trace of the hand, of “the visual representation of material and constructional qualities.” Those qualities that revolutionary artists such as Stepanova and Rodchenko and others had moved beyond for historical and ideological reasons. That said, my work has become more and more attuned over the years to photography, video, film, and to the development of the algorithmic digital. Fields that do not register the hand indexically. But I was long put off by the compositing capabilities of Final Cut Pro, the non-linear video-editing software which for almost 15 years has allowed the hand, by extension of the mouse, to create “painterly” layers in film and video work, post-production effects that to me seemed a nostalgic throw-back to earlier aesthetic modalities and methods. (But perhaps even the temporally bi-furcated term “post-production,” still commonly used, is also growing obsolete.)

Structuralist and other film genres of the 1960s/70s did sometimes involve the indexical sign of the hand acting on cellulose, and so one could say that not too much had changed in the shift from mutilating the film strip to compositing effects in video-editing software. But 21st century Final Cut Pro encourages the solitary “painting” (with the mouse) that art could be presumed to have moved beyond.

Filmmakers such as Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard have made their technological early-adoptor stances a kind of political credo, even if they did/do jerry-rig their low-tech processes rather than high-tailing it to Hollywood.

Godard directing with the “toy train camera rig” used to film parts of “Goodbye to Language 3D,” from En Attendant Godard, by Zoé Bruneau  (Paris, 2014)

You can trace the development of editing software in the degrees of compositing and special effects found in Godard’s films after 2000, which may not consistently present the tech-critical perspective of Farewell to Language. This criticality I can only judge prior to the film’s commercial release by reading mostly between the lines of some reviews – the script, and montage, the visual/technical disorientation of the spectator (in addition to Godard’s signature aural disorientation), but also the inverting of the usual play with 3D – the pushing out rather than pulling in of the spectator, the use of fragment rather than heroic scenario in the 3D genre, etc.

In an early scene, Godard pretzels viewers’ eyes by overlaying one shot over another as a woman walks off-frame—and into a shot superimposed over the previous one, then returns to her original location as the images merge once more. (That scene in particular elicited a round of applause from the Cannes audience, which tittered when the technique surfaced again during a nude scene featuring both actors’ genitals.) 

Godard uses up-to-date digital mediums (indications are that the 3D effects in his latest are mostly developed in post-production, by which is meant in the realm of the digital) but the digital also affords him a kind of aesthetic decision-making that is extremely close to the painterly, especially when compared with the breaks with that approach realized by Duchamp in his reliance on chance, or with the Russian Constructivists who moved toward factography. The number of references to Godard’s painterly techniques in popular critiques of his work is stunning for someone immersed in the digital world of image- and sound-making, not to say filmmaking.

At one point, he includes a quote from Claude Monet, who instructs artists to “paint not what we see, for we see nothing, but paint that we don’t see.” 

There’s no difference between my life and my movies. I’m existing more when I’m making movies than when I’m not. That’s why someone might say to me, “You have no personal life; I can’t have a relationship with you. When we’re making love, you’re suddenly saying, ‘What a beautiful shot I’m thinking of!’ It’s like a painter only speaking of colors.”

But in this historical moment of Capitalism when the global means of production are all over the place in scale and modality – from sweatshops and cottage industry workers to massive assembly lines to the absence of workers altogether in robotic industries – why would facture be easily renounced…we might as well be living in pre-revolutionary Russia…

Foxconn Apple Factory, China. “Foxconn may replace ‘iPhone 6 assembly line workers with “foxbot” robots.”