For all the gold in Alaska --- performance-installation proposal
Video Documentation of Prototype:
Performance-Installation Proposal
Duration: 12hrs.
Projection:
On a table sits a super 8mm projector and a red fish in a bowl placed on top of two books: Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful and Jack London’s Call of the Wild. Twenty feet of Super 8mm film is suspended from the ceiling in a continuous loop using a series of spinning spools attached to fishmonger hooks. The film is hand processed black and white footage of two figures ice fishing, shots include: drilling into ice, drinking from a whiskey bottle, lowering a fishing line, and pulling a sledge across the frozen lake.
The film has been gilded with gold-leaf; as it moves around the loop it glistens in the light from the projector, yet when projected it casts peculiar flashes of marine green. The fish is both projector screen and projected subject: swimming in and out of the screen - at times appearing to be under the drilling of the ice at other times dwarfing the human figures in the landscape.
Performance:
On another table sits a photographic enlarger; under its lamp is another, larger fishbowl filled with water and ice; attached is a darkroom timer. In a corner sits a performer (the artist) wearing North-Sea Arctic fisherman gear: yellow oilskin ‘foulies’, boots, and hat. Each time the loop breaks on the fish hooks (this could happen as regularly as every 30mins or every 4 hrs) the figure stands up, turns off the projector, walks over to the other table, sets the darkroom timer to 30seconds and simultaneously dips his entire head into the bowl whilst pressing the ’start button’, the light of the enlarger shines above him as he struggles to hold his breath in the icy water, the timer ends, the light turns off and he removes his head. He then walks over to the loop and begins re-splicing the film using a cement splicer (this takes roughly 5-10mins) before re-running the projector - the whole process starting again.
Themes:
The books serve a practical purpose to place the fish-bowl at the desired position in relation to the projection but those books were specifically chosen as the two most important books on the sublime ever written. The inclusion of London’s Call of the Wild being half serious and half not: serious because it truly is a book that has lots to teach us about the sublime in its exploration of the domestic & the wild not as fixed opposites but as a back and forth processes of transformation and flux; and seriously unserious because its inclusion pokes fun at the ‘high culture’ of art and philosophy with the childish inclusion of a children’s novel.
The fish appears on one hand ‘pretty’ (a historically perceived opposite of the sublime) and at other times an enlarged ghost/whale dwarfing and even preying upon the fishermen - again we see a flux between large/small, subservience/dominance, the pretty/horrific. Another consideration: if the moving sculpture of the looped super 8mm is the dead industrial machine; the fish is the living organic being, a Romantic resistance placing 'natural spontaneity' amidst modern monotony - despite the looped repetition of the footage, no one frame will be the same.
The gold exists in the work in two forms: (1) seen ‘as is’ in its ‘normal’ color, travelling through the moving loop/sculpture; (2) as it is projected in a surprising and at first not familiar marine green. Thus it flashes as an uncanny incomprehensible phenomenon (analogous to the sublime), whilst also revealing/democratising the mediation behind the illusion. In Call of the Wild referencing the imminent danger of walking upon ice Jack London writes: “The bottom’s likely to drop out at any moment. Only fools, with the blind luck of fools, could have made it. I tell you straight, I wouldn’t risk my carcass on that ice for all the gold in Alaska.”
Inevitably disaster strikes, the film breaks/the ice cracks, the artist dips their head in the icy fish bowl fulfilling the Romantic desire for artist 'emersion' in the wild (too literally) and an ‘authentic’ self-sacrifice to ‘channel’ the sublime to the art viewer - but of course what’s the sacrifice? A fish bowl filled with ice cubes does not an ice-lake make - again we have questions of scale.
To commission this work please send an email to: contact@jmercer.art