Stevenson Gallery
09.09 - 23.10.2021
In 1929, Soviet director Dziga Vertov produced his quintessential Man with a Movie Camera, an experimental documentary that reflects an idealised day in the life of modern Soviet citizens told through a whirlwind of nascent cinematic techniques (double exposure, speed ramping, split screen, etc, etc). I found myself continuously thinking back to Vertov’s film while watching Something this way comes, the 30 minute video work that makes up the centrepiece of Jo Ractliffe’s new solo exhibition at Stevenson, ‘Being There.’
While Ractliffe’s work is unconcerned with rosy depictions of Bolshevik life, there are nonetheless a number of parallels worth teasing out. Both works convey a sense of journey or passage told through disparate elements. Both draw attention to the act of image making with a camera through self-referential depictions of lenses, tripods, photographer’s shadows, and film stock. Most importantly, both rely extensively on montage to convey something external to the documentary image.
Jo Ractliffe, Something this way comes, 2021. Courtesy of Stevenson.
As a political project, Soviet Montage did not hide the filmic seams of edits. Filmmakers such as Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein instead became preoccupied with what could be intuitively read in the juxtaposition of two different shots; similar to the idea of synthesis in Marxist dialectic. In a sense, this is very much the space in which Jo Ractliffe’s photography operates, the layer that hovers above the signifiers in her images.
This is probably why Ractliffe’s work reads so well when presented as smaller scale photographs in extended horizontal sequences that resemble filmstrips.1See her 2019 show ‘Signs of Life,’ also at Stevenson, or the N1 (Every Hundred Kilometers) body of work from 1996-1999. The current show offers the viewer three ways of engaging with this idea: 51 stills from various films that Ractliffe has physically photographed in black and white, the aforementioned video installation, and an experimental ‘sound book’ which translates the audio-visual components of the video to a physical book.2This ‘sound book’ version of Something this way comes keeps the soundtrack in alignment with the images on the page via QR code and sensor. As with most experimental new media projects, it is decidedly temperamental and a tad gimmicky. But it also speaks to Ractliffe’s thoughts on the transcendence of images in interesting ways and is rather gorgeous to look at. The way Phillip Miller’s soundtrack seamlessly adapts, loops, and remixes as you turn the pages is the real star here.
Jo Ractliffe, Something this way comes, 2021. Courtesy of Stevenson.
‘Being There’ finds Ractliffe continuing an inquiry started with ‘Everything is Everything’ in 2017. Diving into her vast archive of photographs, she looks at the unexpected associations that come about when unrelated images are read together. After nearly two years of various phases of lockdown, there’s a level of prescience to Ractliffe’s engagement with reading images that really comes to the fore this time around.
The Stills series feels particularly astute, capturing that sense of being completely oversaturated by imagery. While this is certainly not a new phenomenon, spending so much time consuming media remotely (films, series, social media posts, art fairs) has a habit of blurring everything together into a hodgepodge of detached references. One binge-watched series is quickly overwritten with the next; only select orphan moments are retained.3Maybe that’s just me. I’m still reeling from starting a conversation with a friend about Netflix’s Brand New Cherry Flavor only to realise that I couldn’t actually remember a thing about it.
Jo Ractliffe, Still #23, 2021. Courtesy of Stevenson.
These humble black and white photographs feel like an attempt to ground those images that linger. Their significance transcends their source and latches onto something else. Reducing the dramatic colour of the films to black and white renders these stills raw, visceral. Somehow, they seem tethered more to life than celluloid. Take Still #23 for instance. The image of Tim Roth perpetually frozen in mid air instead of plummeting to his death is utterly horrific without the rich blues that accompany it in Wim Wenders’s Million Dollar Hotel. It hits differently here, and it’s no wonder that the same shot reappears in Ractliffe’s video, this time disrupting a quiet sequence of memorials and accompanied by the alarming confluence of flapping wings in Phillip Miller’s soundtrack.
Produced independently of the visual montage, Miller’s sound design goes a long way towards shaping the viewer’s understanding of the work, sometimes aligning with the visuals, other times contradicting them. A decidedly Ennio Morricone bent in the score at the point when dusty cowboys crop up is too good to be coincidence. Catherine Meyburgh’s shrewd editing sees the photographs moving from right to left, as if whirring past the windows of a car, and solidifying the video’s impression of a lengthy road trip.
Jo Ractliffe, Something this way comes, 2021. Courtesy of Stevenson.
It’s a powerful, affective piece that denies the viewer any sense of belonging or arrival. Part of this no doubt stems from the fact that Ractliffe’s images jump across 30 years and four continents. People, donkeys, mountain passes, scorched earth, and roadside memorials are fleeting encounters which vanish as quickly as they move into view. The overarching impression is one of lonesome restlessness, recalling Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland.
Both Vertov and Ractliffe conclude their films with self-referential images of the editing process. The former shows editor Yelizaveta Svilova manually cutting the film together, while the latter ends on a shot of someone working with reels of negatives (presumably the artist herself). Where Man with a Movie Camera feels resolved, topped-off with a charming stop motion sequence of a bowing tripod, Something… is still rife with tensions.
Photography for Jo Ractliffe is never a flat death, but rather an ethereal branching off. The enduring quality of her work is its lack of a closing parenthesis, its propensity to latch and sprout. ‘Being There’ is a deep dive into this image space, one that deftly skirts the line between the intuitive and the intentional, leaving plenty of its own images that linger.
Jo Ractliffe, Still #33, 2021. Courtesy of Stevenson.
