Mauricio Alejo

Between Still Image and Time-Image

Erandy Vergara*

After having worked with a photo series concerned with the movement of an object from one place to another, Mexican photographer Mauricio Alejo began working with video. He then realized his images needed time and some extra frames to accomplish the idea of action and movement. Since then on videos extended time of 30 frames per second has allowed Alejo to play with the viewers perception of daily objects. e audience is confronted with still images slowly transforming with the passage of time and with minimum interventions by the artist. e purpose of this paper is to analyze the dierences between photography and video and to explore the notions of duration and instant in relation to Alejo's. Drawing from Henri Bergsons thesis on the duration of time and Gilles Deleuzes notion of time-image, this paper explores how the illusion of duration created by the thirty frames of video extends Alejos conceptual and formal possibilities. is paper argues that Alejo pushes the boundaries of photography and video, serving to build a conceptual link between them. For that I will rely on G. E Lessings discussion of the spatial properties of painting and demonstrate that Alejos videos are not limited to what Lessing describes as the single moment of art, but rather, that they unfold within many frames. It is my thesis that the videos under discussion investigate two dierent kinds of temporality: endlessness and eventfulness. ese notions will be discussed in relation to Bergson, Lessing and Michael Fried, respectively. I argue that Alejos videos are still photographs embedded in time, and it is this relationship between still image and moving image, between the instant of the photographic image and the unfolding image of video that I discuss in the following pages.

*Erandy Vergara. Mauricio Alejo: Between Still Image and Time-Image. Luna Crnea 33: Viajes al Centro de la Imagen (Mexico: Centro de la Imagen/CONACULTA, 2012).

Mauricio Alejo Tower (2007)

Photography and the Single Moment

Mauricio Alejo1 began working with photography in the late 1990s, basically constructing still lives with ordinary objects. He devoted the rst year of his career to the construction of ctions, placing the objects at the core of his investigation, as he explains: I thought I was photographing pure ideas, the object as collective memory. [en] I realized that I was not talking about the idea, instead it was about the speci cities of the objects.2 His work changed after 1999, speci cally with the series Airports, consisting of photographs taken from X-Ray lters installed on Mexico Citys airport. Unlike Alejos previous formal images, this work moves towards a dierent approach in the production of images and meaning, it was more about surveillance and control. In 2000, Alejo moved to New York to pursue graduate studies at New York University. is experience and his previous work Airport transformed his approach to photography, which is clearly dierent in the trio Two Cubes, created in 2001. is work, as will be argued below, is crucial to this analysis as it represents Alejos move towards time-based arts. As he puts it: I had never done any work embedded in time, it was always the suspended time, the frozen instant. And yet at the same time, it seemed to me a very interesting aspect of photography, because it required the creation of a past and a future. However, the passage of time was something I had not considered in my work before. When I made this piece I started thinking about time and then I began working with video.3 e point of departure of this essay is the still image and more speci cally photography. For that, I will draw from Lessings canonical text Laocon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), and Frieds Art and Objecthood (1967). Although these approaches address dierent periods in art history, both Lessing and Fried defend what in their view is the material limitation of spatial arts, that is the single moment. For Lessing, painting and sculpture must restrict to the single moment while arts such as poetry and literature must con ne to the succession of time.4 Similarly, Fried is opposed to the exploration of time in the visual arts. For him, the work of art can be meaningful in a single moment and hence, it must surrender to it.5 Neither Fried nor Lessing talk about photography, but they do write about a key element of photography: time. Indeed, photography functions with time, not only the mechanism and process of time exposure; regarding the kind of temporality it depicts, photographys time is the instant. Certainly, the elements of a photograph are frozen in time. Although they can suggest movement and action, what we see in a

Born in Mexico City in 1969, Mauricio Alejo received his BA in Communications at the Universidad Intercontinental in Mexico City in 1987, and a MFA at New York University in 2002. He lives and works between Mexico City and New York.
2 3

Gabriella Gomez-Mont. Mauricio Alejo: Las Cosas y el Ojo Desnudo, Fahrenheit (Dec. 2002) 25.

Alejo quoted in Fernando Llanos, "El Equilibrio Entre la Inocencia y el Conocimiento: Entrevista a Mauricio Alejo, Replica 21 (March 2003) 19.
4

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon; an Essay Upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Trans. Ellen Frothingham. New York: Noonday Press, 1957) 91.
5

Fried focuses speci cally on literalist art; his main thesis is that these kinds of art practices are theatrical, therefore they are antithetical to art. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, Artforum (June 1967, reprinted in Minimal Art: a Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, New Work: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1968).

photograph is just one shot, an instant represented in space.6 As art historian Alberto Ruy Snchez wrote, [n]o one can possibly doubt that time is a fundamental element of photography. It is one of the materials from which photography is made. e photographic apparatus itself is a machine for measuring time: among its other functions, it calculates and controls the entrance, the movement, of a ray of light it is the river which transforms the ow of life into the image of an instant.7 Photography freezes bodies and actions, and even when bodies move there is the possibility of opening the diaphragm and accelerating the speed in order to freeze the passage of time. Obviously this does not mean that time stops, but only that the action is frozen within the lm. For example, one of Alejos photographs entitled Tower (2007) portrays a dish lled with soap bubbles. We ignore how the bubbles were made as we do not see anyone playing with them or building the tower, and we certainly do not see the bubbles breaking as time passes; what we see is the instant that the camera captured. Another example is Todream (2004), which consists of a pile of pillows arranged in the middle of an empty room. e pillows forming a tower that goes from top to bottom are frozen in time, that is what we will always see in this image, not another time within its construction, but this very instant.

Mauricio Alejo Todream (2004)

Here it is important to clarify that, for example, in the early years of the daguerreotype, the process took several minutes and required subjects to remain still. erefore, what seems to be an instant was in fact the result of a long process. In fact, some of the rst images of Daguerre did not show living beings because of the long exposure times. Beaumont Newhall, La Historia de la Fotogra a (Barcelona: G Gilli, 1978).
7

Alberto Ruy Snchez, Nina Subin: Time Within Time, Luna Crnea 19 (Jan.-April 2000) 96.

e time that Lessing and Fried discuss is this instant that will remain frozen in the photograph, the problem is that they consider it its limit, they see it as the only possibility of spatial arts, therefore their time it is not any instant, but the most important one, the single moment. Accordingly, Lessing elaborates on the selection of the right moment, and Fried on how the action and meaning must be reduced within the work. Again, photography captures instants, but the single moment is just one way to explore static images. Another way is Alejos series of photographs and videos, which complicate the single moment thesis.8 As lm theorist Peter Wollen points out: Film and video art, however, exhibit only a small fraction of the possible ways in which time can be used and understood. Time, which we tend to think about in purely linear terms, is in fact incredibly complex.9 For example, Alejos research on time and photography is pushed forward in Hot Water (2004), a series of progressive steaming up of the artist's bathroom. e position of the camera is xed in a bathroom with beige walls and white ceramic in the shower. On the front wall there is a small mirror and we can also see the cabinets on the left side of the image. In the rst photograph the shower is open and the action of falling water is frozen in time, we see its shadow on the ceramic; the mirror re ecting the beige walls. e second photograph was probably taken a few seconds after, but here the space has changed: the drops of water and their shadow are diused and the mirror is not re ecting the walls anymore, instead it is turning white and a kind of light irradiates from it. In short, the image seems blurry. On the third photograph, the mirror has almost fused with the background, is only then that we distinguish that the previous image is not blurry. As we associate the eect with the space, we realize it is the vapor transforming the space, hence the image. e last photograph is completely diuse: we can only recognize a few elements, the edges of the cabinets and the edges of mirror. Each of these photographs depicts an instant, but together they explore the passage of time in that speci c space. In other words, although each image has its own characteristics, as a whole they encompass duration. According to Dolev, the passage of time is the becoming present of future events and then their becoming past.10 is succession of events is explored in Alejos Hot Water, the images being transformed by water as it becomes vapor. What we see is an expansion of the instant that works through the series of multiple instants, not a single moment but an extended instant, a moment unfolding in time, yet limited to these four images. Of course this is just metaphorical, as we cannot measure or divide time (Bergson). Time is absolute duration, but what we do measure is time in its spatial terms. at is what happens in these images, Alejos work is engaged in a succession of instants represented in space. Duration, for Bergson, is real time, perceived and lived, and that is a condition as there is no time without consciousness. Duration is essentially a continuation of what no longer exists into what does exist, but it is not constituted by instants; we think of instants because we are used to think time in spatial terms.11 In fact, for him, instantaneity involves two things: continuity in real time and spatialized time. Spatialized time is described by a motion that has become symbolic of time, so what we perceive is
8 9

Minimalist art is a perfect example of the posibilities of painting. See Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood. Peter Wollen, Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (London; New York: Verso, 2002) 238. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 2007)

10

Yuval Dolev, Time and Realism: Metaphysical and Antimetaphysical Perspectives, viii.
11

Drawing from Einsteins theory of relativity Bergson argues that there are two kinds of time, the time of the philosophers (real time, pure duration) and the time of the physicist (which is measurable as it is perceived in space). See Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe, (Ed. Robin Durie; trans. of supplementary material Mark Lewis and Robin Durie, Manchester, England: Clinamen Press, 1999), specially chapter two and three.

that time passes, and yet, as Bergson assesses, it is we who are passing it is the motion before our eyes which, moment by moment, actualizes a complete history given virtually.12 In Alejos images, the spatial transformations suggest the passage of time, the idea of motion and change within the image gives rise to our perception of duration. Bergson remarks that through space we can measure every interval of time and his elaboration is pertinent here because the spatial allows the passage of time in photography. Furthermore, in the speci c case of Alejos work, through instants he suggests duration.

Mauricio Alejo Hot Water(2004)

12

Ibid, 43.

Two Cubes (2001) is a key example, because it represents Alejos move from photography to video. e work consists of a series of photographs documenting the movement of a transparent acrylic box on a mound of snow. Here again, duration is suggested through instants, through the movement of the cube on the snow, and it is this exploration of the image in time that lead to Alejos decision to work with video. As he has stated, he needed time, and that's why this ideas deserves investigation. e question of time in photography is less about the fact that the medium is limited by itself (Lessing), than it is about another kind of exploration beyond the instant. Rather, Alejo explores a dierent relation with objects and space, another kind of perception of images in which time is not the abstraction that occurs when we project space into timeBergsons time of the physicistbut pure time, lived time with no resemblance to numbers or to instants. Alejos move from photography to video is representative of his philosophical repositioning with the media and his artistic practices; it has to do with his preoccupation to expand the still image. is does not mean that he stopped working with photography, it just means that some of his projects did not t within its space. And even then, Alejos work oscillates conceptually and visually between photography and video, for he does not rely so much on movement but on time, hence the boundaries of these media fade. At this point, it is important to mention that Alejos early videos are reminiscent of the rst experiments with lm of the Lumieres brothers, Geroge Mlies and in fact, various seminal lms and videos As Peter Wollen has noted, Many artists' videos, it seems, are atavistic works, deliberately returning to the single-shot technique which ruled at the very dawn of cinema, setting up a continuous action and then lming it within a given time-limit without any edits or even camera movements.13 is kind of work is representative of numerous artists from the sixties and seventies such as Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, William Wegman. And certainly this has also been the beginning for Alejo. What is important to note is that his background as a photographer highly in uenced his exploration with video; as he explains, his early videos are photographs with time.14 A clear example is Line (2002), a fty-second video of a white screen divided by a line. Certainly, neither the image nor the audio provide directions to see it other ways, what we see is only what the title suggests. Furthermore, it seems that we are looking at a photograph since there are not evident transformations and the light does not seem to re ect movement. It is a photograph until Alejos interventionhis hand emerges from the right and literally interrupts the lineat which point the fragility of perception becomes clear: the line is in fact the steady stream of water. It is then that we make associations and realize that the sound, indeed, corresponds to falling water, but it is so subtle that, paradoxically, we need to know what we are seeing to realize what we are hearing. In addition, the video is so short that we need to see it more than once to grasp the whole and to understand what just happened. Especially when encountering Alejos videos for the rst time we cannot know there is an element of surprise accompanying some of these early works. is discussion leads us to the issue of Lessing single moment, which is in fact very restrictive, as for him each medium is clearly de ned in scope and characteristics. Painting and photography, as spatial arts, are supposed to be limited to the representation of the single moment. But Alejo seems to struggle with this form of temporality, he complicates the single moment and pushes further. In fact, Alejos work in video extends the pregnant moment as the thirty frames per second unfold. is applies to Crack (2002-2004), which is only thirty-two seconds of a static image unfolding in time. e object here is a
13 14

Peter Wollen, Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (London; New York: Verso, 2002) 234. Alejo, Personal Interview, 10 Nov. 2008.

white plate apparently cracked, or at least that is what we see at rst glance. On a closer look however, the plate is lled with milk and by the time we realized it we hear someone blowing on it to reveal that the crack is formed by hair oating on the milk. Again, the elements of the video are minimal, so is the sound and the artist intervention, and yet what seems to be a still image is in fact another statement on perception unfolding in time, another extended still image. According to Alejo this video is about fragility and alludes to two kind of ruptures, that of representation and that of perception. I argue that these ruptures happen through the passage of time. Following Bergson, the suggestion is that the rupture can be experienced by the observer, in as much as her/his consciousness provides duration to time.15 Furthermore, in both Line and Crack, the process of perception is complicated by the artist, who forces the viewer to think of the image dierently and to approach it with more attention in order to experience the expanding instant. Alejo also raises a key question: is it photography or is it video? He works with this question and explores how the instants and durations are negotiated in video. Beyond these forms of temporality there is an interesting tension between Alejos works and cinema. Deleuzes elaboration provides insight. For him the single image in lm is an immobileinstantaneous section of movement re ecting actions through innumerable instants. In other words, cinema is the system which reproduces movement as a function of any-instant-whatever that is, as a function of equidistant instants, selected so as to create the impression of continuity.16 According to Deleuze, the frame in cinema is any-instant-whatever, and as such there is a fundamental dierence between painting and the individual frame in lm, as the later is not the illusionist synthesis of a narrative context, but a single incidental moment (any-instant-whatever) in an overall narrative structure.17 Concerning Alejos video, the any-instant-whatever is put into question. e works in video that have been previously discussed are, especially at the beginning, any-instant-whatever and yet at the same time that instant unfolds, it becomes important by itself, is like a photograph extending the single moment -which is not a single moment anymore. Line, for instance, is a photograph until the hand of the artist disrupts the image allowing us to recognize that time was unfolding before we noticed it. To be clear, however, that does not mean that because there was not consciousness there was not timein Bergsonian termsin fact it is at the very instant of the artists intervention that we acknowledge that duration was unfolding before our eyes. Another still image embedded in time is Twig (2002), a tiny branch and its shadow standing in the middle of a bright bed of snow. e still life is suspended in time as the twig rests in what seems a winter morning in a park. e camera is positioned close to the branch and so we do not know exactly what space is being depicted, but in the distance we hear voices of kids playing as well as the sound of steps approaching the camera and then going away, so the sound suggests action, and yet the branch is frozen in time. Suddenly, the wind blows, taking away the calm of the scene and the twig shadow, which, in fact, is not a shadow but a thin slice of wood identical to the branch. Here, thirty- ve seconds are enough to suspend the observers attention in an instant that unexpectedly moves from still to moving image.

15 16

Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, Chapter 2.

Deleuze quoted in Susanne Gaensheimer, Moments in Time, Moments in Time: On Narration and Slowness (Markham, Ont.: James Lumbers Pub) 41.
17

Ibid.

Mauricio Alejo Line (2002), screen shot.

Mauricio Alejo Crack (2002-2004), screen shot.

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For the artist, Line and Twig are about illusive facts that engage viewers to experience reality in a dierent way because they break the charm of illusion. e minimal elements and contrast of color capture the viewers attention, so in a way these works are what Deleuze calls time-image. In Twig, everything that changes is in time, but time does not in itself change, it could itself change only in another time, inde nitely. At the point where the cinematographic image most directly confronts the photo, it also becomes most radically dierent from it.18 Alejos twig endures, it represent[s] the unchanging form of that which moves, so long as it is at rest, motionless19 Deleuzes time-image incites the viewer to think of the image and to engage in a dierent process of perception. In Alejos work this is possible through the spatial representation of time. For him video and photo are the means of sharing his observation of daily spaces, a way to say maybe there is another space within the same space.20 At this point is crucial to call attention to the title of the works, a very important element of Alejo videos. In fact, he uses the titles as a strategy of distraction, the verbal element preceding the image functions as the linguistic message, in which Roland Barthes distinguishes two functions: anchorage and relay, the former helping the viewer to understand the meaning and the later complementing the image. Alejos videos combine both anchorage and relay, directing the audience to focus its attention on the wrong place at the right time. And yet, once the image unfolds, the visual structure breaks the linguistic.21 From within this context of the instant and its extension in video, the following section focuses on another kind of temporality that Mauricio Alejo has explored, that of endlessness.

Video, Loop and the Rhetoric of Endlessness

Mauricio Alejo has produced other videos that formally deal with Bergsons de nition of pure duration. is is particularly evident in the videos entitled Endless Sphere (2007) and Memory (2002). Endless Sphere is a video in loop that depicts a coin spinning on its edge, and, as the title suggests, the action takes place endlessly. is temporality is consistent with Bergsons notion of duration, in as much as pure duration consists in the passage of time from one moment to another; time is succession and it is not conceived without a before and after. However, it must be remembered that this unfolding does not refer to a clear present and past, but rather to an endless ow of duration.22 Endless Sphere is that, a continuous ow that lasts as long as there is consciousness. In addition, this video is endlessness in meaning. A spinning coin alludes to luck, and yet at the same time is paradoxical because the coin never falls, so luck is never decided, but instead, is suspended in time. Furthermore, the spherical form draws attention to in nity, in both the action (time) and the form (space). In light of this work, the suggestion of endlessness is very interesting if related to Fried's critique of literalist art. As it has been previously mentioned, Fried is against duration in the visual arts and he
18 19 20

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2 (London: Athlone, 1986-1989) 17. Ibid.

Alejo quoted in Fernando Llanos, "El Equilibrio Entre la Inocencia y el Conocimiento: Entrevista a Mauricio Alejo, Replica 21 (March 2003) 19.
21 22

Barthes elaboration will be further discussed regarding the video Fact and Fiction. Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, Chapter 2.

11

critiques the idea that the work of art and the experience exists and persists in time. Moreover, this articulation is crucial because Alejos work has been described as minimalist. e most obvious connections are forms, shapes and other spatial elements; basically the number of elements is extremely reduced and the backgrounds are mundane spaces but always empty and clean. For example, Milk (2002) a white sink ll with milk; Empty (2006), a series of translucent empty plastic bags of dierent colors placed one inside the other. In addition, the artists interest with objects projects objecthood. However, the most important connections between literalist art and some of Alejos videos are in terms of space and time.

Mauricio Alejo Endless Sphere (2007), screen shot.

12

According to Fried, literalist art is open to multiple interpretations and the meaning is inexhaustible, endless. at is, able to go on and on, even having to go on and on23 In addition, there is the passage of time, as the experience persists in time its duration is in nite. For Fried, literalist work deals with the duration of the experience, which persists in time, in short, at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest.24 Fried critiques this idea and argues that the work of art can be meaningful in a single moment. Alejos exploration with time is embedded it these forms of temporality, between the single moment and endlessness. His videos unfold in time, whether endlessly (in loop) or in a few seconds. In terms of space and meaning, literalist art does not respect the boundaries between the work of art and the outside world. is is obvious in Alejos videos; by depicting daily objects staged in ordinary stages and by directly intervening in the image, the viewer is taken outside the work of art and is brought back to the ordinary world. e possibility of time and duration in art, that is, the wholly manifestation of art that Freid is so afraid of, is the core of Alejos videos Endless Sphere and Memory. ese works play with this form of temporality and they are endlessness in meaning and action. What does a coin spinning in perpetuity, for as long as you watch, mean? Alejos work is full of interpretation, it goes on and on and back again and the single moment is not a still image but a moving image, a digital signal that extends and unfolds in light and time. Memory consists of a crumpled ball of paper on a white background. e image is therefore neutral, extremely clean and subtle as the ball of paper slowly unravels. We imagine what comes next: the paper will regain its original form, retrieve its composure, reassert its purity, the camera will be put on rewind and the sequence of events that lead to the balling-up reversed. But instead the image fades out after approximately ve seconds and it is replaced by another shot of a tightly crumpled sheet, which begins to unravel only to be cut and replaced yet again. is occurs 43 times25 In a gallery space, this video is presented in loop so the unfolding of the piece of paper is in nite and the sound increases the feeling of abstraction and suspension. e duration of the event per se is not even a minute, but the duration of the experience is endless. As Bergson wrote, it is impossible to distinguish between the duration, however short it may be, that separates two instants and a memory that connects them, because duration is essentially a continuation of what no longer exists into what does exist.26 is tension is at play in Memory. On the other hand, Short Term Memorys temporality is a clear representation of time in space, but is not endless, at least not obviously. Here, the camera is xed on a roll of toilet paper with a black dot of ink in the middle; as the artist pulls it, the paper unfolds and the black spot becomes smaller and smaller until it disappears. is work is extremely poetic and it functions as a metaphor of what Bergson describes as the inner duration that accompanies us from the rst to the last moment of our conscious life.27 e time is literally unfolding and yet the temporality is not clear; is it pure duration? Is it an instant, or is it the way our memories vanish with the passage of time? Further, is it really short term memory or is it nostalgia? According to the artist it is an emotional and sentimental choreography and if we consider his previous work, the idea of choreography functions in the level of movement, an aspect that was not completely explored in most of his early videos from 2002-2004.
23 24 25 26 27

Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, Artforum, 166. Emphasis of the author. Ibid, 167. Christopher Ho, Doubting Saint omas, Modern Painters (February 2005). Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, 33. Ibid, 34.

13

On the other hand, the reference to memory escapes Bergsons two forms of memory, pure memory and habit-memory as the ink fades and there is no way to restore it. In fact, the image may be restored but not the ink; it has vanished. If, as Bergson wrote, memory is the intersection of mind and matter, then this work restores the perception of images to the real. Unlike Memory, Short Term Memory alludes to life and its inevitable decay, to the certainty that everything in life is hopelessly bound to collapse. However, [Alejo] manages to nd beauty in the fact that within even the most annihilating inertia, there is a moment when all things make sense. ere is a moment when everything appears to be not only tied together, but also ful lled and removed from the mechanism of deterioration. It is from these very moments that Alejo attains a precious feeling of wholeness; a feeling that eventually wears out and becomes the very essence of nostalgia.28

Mauricio Alejo Memory (2002), screen shot.

28

Galeria Ramis Barquet, Mauricio Alejo: Crossing a Flimsy Bridge, press release (March, 2006).

14

Mauricio Alejo Short Term Memory (2006), screen shot.

15

Mauricio Alejo Fact and Fiction (2002-2004), screen shot.

Also key is Fact and Fiction (2007), a video showing the front cover of a book entitled Fatti e Finzioni. e title and the work allude to the presence-absence of the artists and to the idea of ction and construction in video. e same can be said about the image, because we see the book and the artists moist hand imprinted on the matte paper, but the video is edited in a way that we are not allowed to see his hand. Moreover, the video is presented in loop so the action is unfolding in time; past present and future fading in circles. At stake here is the artists strategy to recreate and to record motion, because the only thing remaining is the trace that his body left on the object, the moisture draws and erases the silhouette and we can almost see his bones on the book creating the sense of movement and at the same time acting as the only testimony of Alejos presence. It is for this reason that Fact and Fiction reveals another kind of approach to the media: the camera is xed and of course the book is static, it is the moisture as it abandons the book that gives us the illusion of movement, but in fact, it is through time that the silhouette fades in and out endlessly.

16

In a way, Fact and Fiction is consistent with Deleuzes crystal-image for its main element is time, as he describes: since the past is constituted not after, the present that it was but at the same time, time has to split itself in two at each moment as present and past, which dier from each other in nature, or, what amounts to the same thing, it has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past.29 At the same time, there is a preoccupation with the recording of events and its ctitious reconstruction, an invitation to the audience to think about the image; this bring us to another elucidation of Deleuze since the construction of reality and ction has to do with time itself. e kind of lms (and video) that Deleuze calls the series of time brings together the before and after in a becoming, instead of separating them; its paradox is to introduce an enduring interval in the moment itself.30 As the title suggests this video is in between fact and ction, and so conceptually it is also suspended in a loop, showing us that the ideal of Truth was the most profound ction.31 On the one hand this relationship between ction and video (of course inherited from photography) will now be brie y discussed in terms of Barthes. For him, the linguistic image is denoted and the symbolic image is connoted, and although this distinction is merely operational as there is not a literal image in pure state (42), photographys supposedly exact recording of reality "naturalizes the symbolic message, [and] it innocents the semantic arti ce of connotation."32 is is something that Alejo uses to confront the viewer with an image that is not what it looks like. As he comments, critically, I am only interested in contributing to the skepticism of the image, that is, the photographic image and the image of video are discourses, they are not reality and they are not absolute truth. e media is a great ction disguised of truth.33 Similarly, Gravity (2002-2004) plays with the idea of ction and viewers perception. e video starts when a white balloon is thrown in the air and then it slowly de ates, becoming smaller until it is completely empty, but, when it is expected to fall, the balloon instead goes upward, and then the sound of it falling to the oor is heard. at is what we can see, the empty balloon is not going downwards but it rather drifts to the top of the screen. Gravity contains an element of surprise, but it does not seem to be possible, let alone real; gravity is absolute, isnt it? Once again at stake is perception and visual illusions that seem to be staged in the theater of the obvious and yet pose the ability to surprise and make viewers see that what they see is not reality but a spatial construction. Technically, it may not be hard to rotate the video 180 degrees to subvert the image, but the surprise forces the viewers to shift the process of perception in a very short time, taking them out of the habit-memory.34 Hence, they experience surprise, disappointment or disillusion because certainly that is not what they expected. In that sense, this work alludes to Deleuzes thought-image, in which thinking becomes an element of the image. It must no

29 30 31 32 33

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, 81. Ibid, 155. Ibid, 149. Roland Barthes, Rhetoric of the Image, Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) 45.

Alejo quoted in Fernando Llanos, "El Equilibrio Entre la Inocencia y el Conocimiento: Entrevista a Mauricio Alejo, Replica 21 (March 2003) 19.
34

Henri Bergson, Of the Recognition of Images, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1990) 77-132.

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longer be understood as an object exterior to the image that the latter is supposed to represent.35 e question of audience is key to Alejos work because it requires the viewer to enter his game of perception. According to Alejo, what interests me about video is that it invites an intelligent audience, I mean you dont want to lie, you want that they take part in the lie with you, that in the moment of the trick there is not greater surprise than believing that reality can be another way or many dierent ways.36 Here it is pertinent to think of Gravity and probably most of Alejos videos in terms of Bergons perception, which is the intersection of attention and memory. For him, past images are always preserved, but they are stored in two dierent places, pure memories are stored within consciousness while habitual memories are stored in the brain. e former images while the later repeats. ey both live on forever but the habit memory is practical in our daily life, thus it is the most recurring. erefore, if perception is always aected by memory, what we see on Alejos images is not only what we see but what we remember. e most important aspect of his work regarding perception, I argue, is that it challenges the habit memory, thus disrupting our perception of daily objects and spaces. Although each image will appeal to dierent memories and its impact will depend on each observer, because the images are staged in mundane spaces there is no need for a speci c audience, hence recognition does not rely on exclusivity: there can be connections and even identi cation. at is what make Alejos work strong: few elements in mundane spaces and concise actions in short time: simple to store in the brain. For example in Line, the only elements are the line and the artist hand, thus they get straight to the point and straight to the brain; powerful enough to persist in time and in our memory.

35

Heme de Alcote quoted in Barbara Filser, Gilles Deleuze and a Future Cinema, Future Cinema: e Cinematic Imaginary After Film, ed. Jerey Shaw and Peter Weibel. (ZKM/Zentrum fr Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003) 215.
36

Alejo quoted in Fernando Llanos, "El Equilibrio Entre la Inocencia y el Conocimiento, 19.

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Mauricio Alejo Gravity (2002-2004), screen shot.

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Bibliography
Amy, Michael. Mauricio Alejo at Ramis Barquet. Art in America (Nov, 2006). Barthes, Roland. Rhetoric of the Image. Image-Music-Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Bergson, Henri. Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe. Ed. Robin Durie; trans. of supplementary material Mark Lewis and Robin Durie. Manchester, England: Clinamen Press, 1999. --------.Matter and Memory. Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. Callender, Craig, ed. Time, Reality and Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2. London: Athlone, 1986-1989. Dolev, Yuval. Time and Realism: Metaphysical and Antimetaphysical Perspectives. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 2007. Filser, Barbara. Gilles Deleuze and a Future Cinema. Future Cinema: e Cinematic Imaginary After Film. Ed. Jerey Shaw and Peter Weibel. ZKM/Zentrum fr Kunstund Medientechnologie Karlsruhe; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003, 214-219. Galeria Ramis Barquet. Mauricio Alejo: Crossing a Flimsy Bridge. Press release (March, 2006). 2003): 25.

Gomez-Mont, Gabriella. Mauricio Alejo: Las Cosas y el Ojo Desnudo. Fahrenheit (Jan. Ho, Christopher Doubting Saint oma. Modern Painters (February 2005).

Javault, Patrick. Vido Topiques. Paris: Paris Muses, Muse d'Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg, 2002. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoon; an Essay Upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry Frothingham. New York:Noonday Press, 1957. Trans. Ellen

Llanos, Fernando. "El Equilibrio Entre la Inocencia y el Conocimiento: Entrevista a Mauricio Alejo. Replica 21 (March 2003): 19. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, Artforum (June 1967, reprinted in Minimal Art: a Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, New Work: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1968). Newhall, Beaumont. La Historia de la Fotogra a. Barcelona: G Gilli, 1978. Parfait, Franoise. Video, un Art Contemporain. Paris: Regard, 2001. Rivero Lake, Francisca. "Mauricio Alejo" Art Nexus 43 (Nov 2002) 111.

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Ruy Snchez, Alberto. Nina Subin: Time Within Time Luna Crnea 19 (Jan.-April 2000). Wees, William C. e Camera Eye: Dialectics of a Metaphor. Future Cinema: e Cinematic Imaginary After Film. Ed. Jerey Shaw and Peter Weibel. ZKM/Zentrum fr Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003, 48-55. Wollen, Peter. Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film. London; New York: Verso, 2002.

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