(photo via KinoBrain.com)
Aaron Granat’s been very busy as of late. When he’s not teaching undergraduate courses in video production at UW-Madison, Aaron’s video portraiture has graced the likes of the new Central Madison Library and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the latter of which, Triennial Portraits, commemorated MMoCA’s 2013 Triennial by highlighting patrons’ reactions to featured artwork. Aaron’s latest piece, Focal Points, was featured in the Mana Contemporary Fine Arts Gallery in Chicago and is comprised of 16 portraits that directly juxtapose each artist with his or her work.
Aaron has also directed several music videos and works as a cinematographer with writer/director Brandon Colvin. Their latest collaboration, Sabbatical, is a measured look at a struggling writer’s return home and plays as part of the “Wisconsin’s Own” and “New American Cinema” series in this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival.
In advance of presenting his work this Thursday at the Central Madison Library, Aaron spoke with me about observation’s influence on art, his creative touchstones, and the relationship between his video art and narrative filmmaking:
There’s a lot of interplay in your work between “art vs. the artist” or “art vs. the observer.”
With Focal Points, I wanted to show works of art juxtaposed with their creators and to provide a superficial comparison on a surface level. I wanted to make the audience aware of their perceptual habits in that they have to make aesthetic value judgments on what’s most interesting to them: the art or the artist.
Especially with Triennial Portraits, the functional purpose was to generate curiosity in the exhibition, but the aesthetic purpose was to subvert our perception in a creative way that would get us to think about how we make sense of art. When the performers on camera are looking and responding to the art, they are interrupting our view by standing between the camera and the piece of art they’re observing. As viewers, we can’t view the art without taking the spectator into our vision as well. It symbolizes the aesthetic experience, and the meaning we derive from artwork is solidified by the art itself, the viewer who encounters the art, and the background and attitudes the viewer brings with them.
In Triennial Portraits, performers aren’t just observing the art. They’re also talking about each piece. Are all of these conversations organic? Or predetermined?
It’s a little of both. I try to establish enough parameters to achieve an interesting result for myself, but at the same time I want [the performers] to have some freedom. In “Receptacle,” I created a specific circuit for the performers to walk around the piece and give them pointers on how to organize their conversation, foregrounding what they don’t know about the piece without any promise of resolving their curiosity. I also told them to bring in some special or personalized knowledge and encouraged them to go on tangents that have no direct connection to the art itself. If what they’re seeing reminds them of what they ate for breakfast that morning, I want them to include that.
In a way, that forward and open approach is inviting, too. Not just for each portrait, but for the featured art as well.
I think we’re accustomed to narrative structures or approaches that tend to be very communicative. As a teacher of film, when I instruct on classical continuity rules in Hollywood, the priority is always ensuring the audience knows everything necessary for each scene. In my personal work, I’m interested in subverting that and using a lack of spatial information based on curiosity and surprise. Frames are a really interesting aspect of art in general and can have a really powerful effect on a piece.
In the “Receptacle” portrait, Sabbatical‘s Brandon Colvin is a featured performer. How is your approach as a cinematographer on Brandon’s films different than in your own video art projects?
Brandon and I have similar compositional styles. Brandon’s narrative films stand out based on their performance style which can be considered very minimalist and restrained. His performers have to control their expressions so that they can withhold their psychological disposition from the viewer for ambiguity, forcing the viewer to bring his or her subjectivity to the experience. That’s a very similar approach to what I bring to my video art. I also like to create that sense of ambiguity where the viewer can look at a subject and equally express a sadness or confidence.
You’ve named Chantal Akerman and Andy Warhol as chief among your creative influences. How has their art found its way into your own projects?
Warhol was both a video maker and archivist in that he would require people to sit through a “screen test” — about two minutes where they would sit in isolation in front of a camera with a neutral facial expression. This body of work Warhol created was expanded as more people discovered Warhol and his artistic community. A lot of my work is sort of driven by that model, where you have creative concepts and create parameters for it and set it in motion.
I envisioned Focal Points as a kind of archive of the artistic community in Madison, growing as I grow and expand my network. It’s served as my own archive but also as a system with a loosely-based set of rules for each artist to follow. Each artist responds a little bit differently, and so it’s always a little different collaboration [between the artist and me]. Warhol was one of the first filmmakers to explore certain stylistic qualities of the medium such as unbroken passages of time and excluding narrative context. This affects both the performer, so to speak, and the audience, in that we don’t have a contextual safety net for how we understand the film. When you take that context away, we’re left to our own devices to create significance and interpret meaning. Likewise, if a performer doesn’t have a script to follow, then a new creative approach has to emerge and it becomes a challenge for them to figure out how to exist in front of the camera.
And Akerman?
Chantal Akerman did similar things in both her narrative and documentary excursions. In her narrative work, Akerman has this film called Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a very long narrative film, and a lot of it is sort of a quiet view of this woman doing household chores. There’s an extended sequence of her preparing food, and without any emotional expression or narrative development, it provides insight into human behavior while getting to know her as a person.
D’Est (The East) is basically a portrait of crumbling Soviet countries as the Soviet Union was going into dissolution and instead of interviewing people to give testimony, Akerman basically turned on the camera and had people sit still or got shots of people walking toward or away from the camera. Other times she’d have the camera tracking alongside pedestrians and while they were often aware of the camera’s presence, they didn’t necessarily feel a pressure to interact with it. I remember feeling like I was spending an intimate, rich time with these people [in the film] despite the language barriers. It really made sight and sound the focus of my attention as a viewer. Sometimes I think language can dampen the cinematic experience.
- As part of the Madison Public Library’s “Central Cinema,” Aaron will present his work in person Thursday night at 6:30p in Rm 302 of the Central Madison Library. Like all “Central Cinema” programs, admission is FREE.