Exactly what mise en scène  is remains something of a mystery. Although used widely as a phrase, most usually relating to film and cinema, closer inspection reveals that there really isn’t any singular and consensual definition of exactly what it is. And yet, somehow, most of us seem to have a societal functioning understanding of the term when we hear or use it.

At the risk of failing to come to a conclusion that has eluded many thinkers on the topic, it might, nonetheless, be worth revisiting to the concept as a means of engaging with some of the practices of contemporary artists. If we are unable to say precisely what mise en scène is (and by inference what it is not), then we might at least be able to consider what it can be; its possible meanings and mechanisms. And more specifically how these mechanisms -by coincidence or design- relate to the works of some contemporary artists.

In one way, the term appears to have been developed through realising that anything that appears on screen other than the actual actors and narrative content also play a key role in defining how we read or respond to a film. More specifically, the term appears to have developed out of recognition of the evolutionary developments of the fledgling art form of cinema.

The term mise en scène (or mise-en-scène) intrinsically acknowledges that any element that appears in the frame can be ordered, designed or manipulated to an intended effect. By implication it also holds the notion of recognising that someone, at some point, started do more than just point a camera in the general direction of the action. Built into the term is the notion that at some point in cinema’s history, certain individuals grasped the potential of the camera to absorb manipulated visual elements that would later unfold with new meaning and significations on the screen.

As with the term itself, arguments rage as to exactly at what historical point this term –itself a bastardised concept lifted from theatre- became something new in the hands of filmmakers no longer satisfied with merely directing their lenses at spectacle or acted out stage plays filmed beneath the then necessary glass roofs.  Was it Méliès with his flights of fancy achieved through early special effects techniques? Was it D. W. Griffiths with his exploitation of lavish sets and new camera techniques? Or was it the German Expressionists with their obsession with the use of lighting and their intention to depict a psychological filmscape as much as a setting? The historical debate over origination continues…

Regardless of who exactly formulated an understanding that multiple elements –physical and technical- could and should be manipulated to a greater end is less important here than considering the systemic implications. Mise en scène is sleight of hand. It is about an understated act of staging a discourse. It is about recognising that all elements form a greater whole and that the design of something that might not hold the centre of attention –for example, the design of the furniture in the background or the textile on an actor’s costume- can play an important role in affecting the whole subjective experience of film.

Even when barely noticed or pushed to the outer edges of the frame, the design and manipulation of these elements can play a key role in our experience of the overall work. In fact, some cineastes will argue, mise en scène can play its most effective role when it is not consciously brought to the attention of the viewer. The audience may remember a powerfully emotional scene without consciously noticing how light and colours have been used to heighten the mood. The movement of the camera itself and its particular perspective can be used to create feelings that the viewer subjectively experiences in the moment rather than analysing how and why it has been achieved.

Our societies now are saturated with film languages. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that contemporary visual artists might explore similar processes, practices and languages to those developed by cinema. And, indeed, the cross-fertilization between visual art and design and the world of cinematic mise en scène has a history dating from the first advent of its use in cinema. One need only think of the iconographic examples of the phenomenon’s active development to recognise this. Robert Wiene’s expressionistic deployment of sets and lighting for The Cabinet of Dr Caligari  (1920) bears a stronger relationship to developments in the visual arts and design than it does to the bland visual languages of the international outpouring of cinema melodramas and comedies contemporaneous to its production.

German cinema production in the early and mid twentieth century offers a strong example of the recognition of these techniques as a powerful cinematic tool not only in creative terms, but also in terms of hard-nosed economics. The impact of employing highly skilled visual artists and designers (alongside recognised writers and composers) had a number of benefits. In immediate economic terms, it could make money from audiences eager to experience new cinematic forms; not only spectacle, but literally to enter into visions of different worlds whilst the projector rolled. Secondly, it served to improve the prestige of cinema, raising it from its original sordid sideshow roots to something that could attract larger entrance fees from the bourgeoisie now prepared to enter the new luxurious picture palaces. It enabled them to justify their interest in terms of traditional bourgeois values. Cinema need no longer be a plebeian activity. One could be a patron of the arts.

The return to conscious interdisciplinary practices by visual artists in recent decades has held high profile. And, arguably, this profile has never been higher than when artists have engaged with another or other disciplines that have an active presence in the banal populist context of daily life. Stepping away from the hermetic almost monastic existence of the artist that arose in the 1970’s: the intellectual conceptual researcher working in almost silent ways. More recently, artists who have gained attention in both the specialist art world (and more understandably, the broader media) have been those who have engaged with visual languages or phenomena that make a transition to the daily experience of a wider population.

In some cases, this move has focussed on the visual languages coming directly from the mass media itself; film, fashion, television. But in other cases, the connection to the daily popular experience has focussed on other visual languages. For example, it has engaged with the languages of the physical urban landscape. Architecture and “the documentary” have both been “hot” tropes, especially where they have been used as leverage to explore other preoccupations such as its relationship to Utopian thinking or political meta-narratives. But, perhaps, most clearly and most relevantly to this discussion, artists who have engaged directly with the mass media have moved to front place. One need only think of the type of profile enjoyed by Matthew Barney, where the lines between the artist and Hollywood director have blurred, not only in terms of production budgets and techniques, but also in the kind of media interested in giving him space on the page.

The Physical Mise en Scène

Ming Cho Lee’s  (b. Shanghai 1930) seminal stage designs for Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival production of Peer Gynt in 1969 highlights the interplay between artistic disciplines such as literature, design and visual art. His earlier designs had already played with elongated sweeping lines and proportions that both allude to Expressionism and a Sino-Japanese sensibility associated with traditional prints or paintings. In a sense, Ming Cho Lee had already spent time developing his ideas that set design should be presentational not representational; that it should engage with the essence of the play rather than describe the physical locations in which the actions occur.

But, the huge outdoor space of the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park afforded Ming Cho Lee the opportunity to work in a new way. The previous works for indoor productions in more traditional theatre spaces with their specific proportions demanded his skill to create the illusion of physical spaces that weren’t there. The huge outdoor venue, by contrast, provided the opportunity to relish in a real vast space.

Lee’s huge structure, effectively a massively oversized and distorted set of stairs at once alludes to the burgeoning Expressionist visual aesthetic contemporaneous to the play’s writing. It achieves this in part through the dizzying angles, distorted proportions and elongated vertical lines of its construction. Fundamentally it is a simple thing akin to a scaffolding construction. It is Ming Cho Lee’s skill with the distortion of its simple elements that enables it to simultaneously evoke the play’s Expressionist yearnings and a  also evoke a stylised, possibly Eastern, aestheticism. There is a sense in which it is very much about engaging with the essential content of the play and, perhaps, also doing so as a dialogue with a designer who has his own identity in the real world. 

With this massive design, there was no need for a distortion of the physical action. Part of the work’s visual communication is that it can literally become Peer’s mountain or the cavernous kingdom of the trolls or the towering ruins of Egypt. It is a work that fully engages with the pure physicality that theatre can rarely have, a demanding obstacle course on which the literary narrative must be acted out in all its physical action. This really was Peer Gynt’s mountain to be scaled by the human scale actor; really the bowels of the earth into which a person-sized figure had to descend in search of the Troll King.

Exactly how conscious and conceptual this aspect of the work was can only by guessed. Certainly, the huge spectacular aspect of the work is not isolated in theatrical history. Again, earlier in the 20^th century, the Germans were no strangers to the use of scale in design for theatrical events. Max Reinhardt’s love for the spectacular may have even been something of a training ground for the much darker potential of others –in fact, his enemies- to exploit spectacular theatrical spaces in humanity’s darkest moments. Theatre, as born out by the use of Nuremberg’s stadium, was one of the many artistic forms that the Nazis harnessed in their distinct use of cultural forms as a propaganda machine.

What is interesting about Ming Cho Lee’s design for Peer Gynt, however, is the way in which the mise en scène was extremely pared down, informed by his own work in the post-World War II period in which the theatre was stripped bare of design elements. Or more accurately, in which theatrical design elements gave the impression of being stripped bare.

Despite consisting of very little of other than the functional materials  –there are not many apparent elements of decoration present- it nonetheless managed to convey a whole range of implied narratives and aesthetic traditions. And in this sense, it is an essential Ming Cho Lee work. We neglect at our peril to acknowledge the deftness and skill with which those working in disciplines outside of “fine art” are able to deploy the talents we elevate in artists. Lee’s ability to intentionally direct our awareness to make a whole series of connections between what we actually see on stage and what it evokes are every bit as skilled as the Spanish modernist’s ability to construct an image of a human nude from a few fluid lines.

Secondly, it moves into a newer, fresher territory by literally providing a backdrop –or more accurately, an environment- for actors to exploit extreme physicality. There is no risk of Peer Gynt slipping off the edge of the stage as he races through his domain. This is a stage with the space to run. And, more importantly, it is a staging in which the observer can observe the character actually running, not merely pretending to run. This is a shift into a theatrical experience in which the liminal, the physical, the gestural can be experienced in a way in which one aspect –the physical action- is at once allowed to be far more naturalistic in its potential extremity. The performer has the option of running at full power without slipping off into the wings. But, it does not for one minute pretend to be “naturalistic” or “realistic” in the experience of the total image it presents; what we see when the physical action takes places within this very particular mise en scène.  Ming Cho Lee’s design makes no attempt to pass for the buildings and outdoor locations demanded by the play even if it demands actual running, jumping, fighting from the actors.

This new condition between the physical and artifice, perhaps only coincidently possible because of the design, is something that would later become a key feature of many of the performed arts held up as groundbreaking, beautiful or worthy over the next few decades.

Pina Bausch’s seminal female “The Right of Spring” danced on a dance-unfriendly stage of earth in 1975 is clearly related to the elements of Ming Cho Lee’s design. The stage, freed of everything except for its extreme textural qualities, at once creates a beautiful contrasting image and demands a focus on the physical experience. Who in the audience could not be fascinated at seeing how dancers would cope on a wet, boggy earth rather than a clean sprung floor? Who would not wonder what it felt like to roll on that moist ground in a clean Picasso-esque chemise? The body and its experience of a real, physical world is everywhere in these works, as it is in so many of the subsequent works that later came to be categorised as “Neo Expressionist”. Incidentally but importantly, these examples from the performed arts pre-dated many of purely visual art works and practices such as painting that would be included under the same term; Kiefer, Baselitz et al.

Bausch, her protégés and those influenced by her developed a language in a new kind of dance, a tanztheater in which the traditional lines between the play and contemporary dance began to blur or, more accurately, cease to exist. This is readily acknowledged. But, perhaps, more importantly, the lines between these performed arts and the visual arts also began to shift, something that the visual art world has less readily acknowledged about these developments. The makers of these live experiences were –and are- deeply entrenched in making memorable visual images that have a life of their own completely independent of an audience’s interest in “contemporary dance”.

Vivienne Newport and Meryl Tankard may have remained closer to the original languages originally coming out of Wuppertal, but soon the intonations and nuances would become absorbed into a European trope of recognised performed art conventions. Outside of Germany, perhaps Belgium embraced the potential most enthusiastically with the likes of Jan Fabre, Rosas, Marc Vanrunxt and Wim Vandekeybus all gaining recognition for their individual styles and performed works. And beyond the tight Flemish ranks, others can also be understood in terms of the trend, back at home in Germany and beyond: Martha Clarke, Sascha Waltz, Meg Stuart….

Individual, they may be, yet all share elements that cling firmly to a Bauschian gestural language of the physicality. However, the total visual language of this trope is not only one that relies on the physicality and actions of the dancers and performers. It is one in which the mise en scène is crucial; every element is designed. Even where this appears to not be the case.

Perhaps it is also reasonable to argue that there is a common mechanism in the mise en scène created by each of these artists; that they focus heavily on gearing the audiences’ experience to the intersection of the very real physical world, the corporal experience (existing in the real time of the performance) and the thousands of implied narratives or emotional states that might be connected with it (signified by the design elements such as lighting and sets that are a choreographed constant in each performance). Most crucially, they can only create this intersection if the eye of the traditional artist is used to choose that which is not physical, is used to design every element beyond the choreography.

Consider the following:

• In Bausch’s (1997) work, “Der Fensterputzer” the performers frolic and dance on and about a gigantic mountain of red flowers that towers high above the plane of the stage.
• In Jan Fabre’s  (1984), “The Power of Theatrical Madness”, the stage is filled with frogs. The frogs are covered with a huge white cloth and then the performers jump all over the cloth that appears to stain with the blood of the crushed amphibians.
• In Win Vanderkeybus’ “Blush” (2005) performers jump through a screen showing a film of themselves swimming underwater, at another point in the action, the dancers build a high tower out of black cushion blocks, scaling it to a dangerous height
• In Sascha Waltz’s “Körper” a huge piece of the set, looking something like a Richard Serra sculpture falls over, crashing to the stage, narrowly missing the dancers in a moment reminiscent of the famous sequence from the silent classic film
• In Martha Clarke’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (1984) a female dancer, ironically “nude” in a body suit of a pink used by Bosch for human flesh is stabbed through the chest with the spike stand at the base of the cello used by one of the musicians on stage. Her movements twitch as he pulls the spike from her chest, the cello itself making the sound of metal rubbing against human ribs.

The list goes on….

The key characteristic that links all such works is that away from their own content and choreographic languages, all create a visual language in which the potential of the physical body – for endurance, for expression, for risk- only exists in relation to the environment of sets and objects meticulously and very intentionally designed around it; in relation to the mise en scène. Furthemore, we can assume that this is seen as a crucial element to the makers of these works. Why should they bother if they were not?

Quite apart from the sheer economic costs of producing this dense visual language, in self-referential dance terms there has been no need to do so since the advent of the abstract modernist dance languages of Cunningham and others in the 1950’s. Since then, it has been valid to make a choreography in which no elements other than the basic human body, the physicality is required. And, indeed, many of the great “modern” dance institutions philosophically adhere to this abstract dance tradition with its emphasise on minimising any elements that detract from the movement of the dance itself or introduce manipulated narrative elements.

We can only assume, therefore, that this creation of the mise en scène for a human physicality has been a core need for these artists to develop their discourses. It is certainly one of the key features that distinguishes them from preceding movements in the performed arts. And, some of the more recent works by some of them –for example, Jan Fabre or Anna Teresa de Keermaeker- seem to be interested in paring back the rich visual language of the setting in favour of a conceptualist focus on rather historical choreographic languages. This only highlights the extent of the importance of the intentional use of  mise en scène to their overall body of work. Turning the tide and working in opposition to one’s usual practice is, after all, an affirmation of its preceding central role.

In a meandering elliptical way, all of this only serves to underscore that mise en scène – cinematic, theatrical or otherwise- is primarily about human conditions. It may be in some cases such as those already discussed, in an immediate relational way in which the physical experience and expression is fore grounded within a specifically designed environment. However, it remains about the human experience even when the physical body itself is removed: the sets of Caligari still signify a human psyche even when the actors are off screen. And, a painter, though decisions about the details, may be telling us more about a human emotional experience than architecture when painting an empty room.  

Perhaps it is purely coincidental that Wannes Goetschalckx is Flemish. Or perhaps there is some unspoken way in which his work connects with the visual motifs and mechanism of using mise en scène to construct complex and frequently amusing discourses that have arisen so distinctly within the Flemish performed arts of the last two decades.

Theoretically, he is a visual and performance artist rather than a choreographer or theatre maker. However, in the case of the Flemish the choice to flout such distinctions has already been validated as an option such as in the works of Jan Fabre amongst others. Likewise, Wannes Goetschalckx not only makes performances and video but also objects, installations, and sculptures. 

In the performance works –and residual quasi-documentary video works of them- the kind of intersection between the physical experience and using mise en scène highlight his connection to the established body of Flemish makers of performed arts rather than dismiss it. We see moments in his work, including its quirky humour, that relate far more readily to grounds explored by Wim Vandekeybus or Rosas than what we might think of as “video art” or “performance art”.

Of course, his choice to work, individually or collaboratively, within the context of visual arts (rather than in theatre or dance) is important to the discourse of the works. He chooses to include the gallery space or public spaces in the performances he makes. And, in experiencing the works, we are suddenly confronted with how refreshing this is. If we have managed to stretch our imaginations to viewing the gallery or museum as a venue for live art in a theatrical sense, then we almost certainly didn’t imagine that it could become such an amusing setting for the kind of low-budget, conceptual action movie that “1STORY” (2006) proves to be.

There are also multiple layers: the careful thinking that goes into the making of such a work and the meticulous production of the special tools and objects that will be used in the work; the collaboration with a filmmaker (in this case Kurt Augustyns) that will give the work its specific dimensions of existing as both the live experience and its subsequent traces; the requirements for the body to make the work.

However, at the heart of this work and other performance-based work exploring related ideas is the physical experience. This is work about the physicality of the human body –in this case the artist’s own- and its conceptual relationships to objects and spaces. This is the thread that connects it to the languages of preceding performed arts and largely defies the expectations of languages that we have come to understand as “performance art”.  Wannes’ body contorts and twists in a series of clever feats and vaguely pointless tricks as he uses the gallery space and his carefully prepared tools to make his fascinating and somehow funny journey. We are confronted with a similar series of questions about the body, motivations, psychology and meaning in much the same way that choreography from the Bauschian lineage asks us to do so: through using the human body and its actions as a relational interrogative.

The pure silliness of it at times -another key element- not only connects to the humour of the Bauschian lineage, but also to the mechanisms used in the visual arts, for example in the early film works of Fischli and Weiss. The same child-like fascination that allows us to watch –and more importantly enjoy- the endless Meccano-set-science-fair chain of events in their work holds our fascination with Wannes’ journey over, through and around a distinct place or environment. And we particularly relish it when it’s a po-faced space meant for the serious consideration of art.

The mise en scène created in the filmed performance is as important as it would be to any Hollywood blockbuster because, by designing Hollywood out, by effectively making an action pic that is so clearly not a big budget thriller, we are prompted to think about the nature of the physical body’s actions in other filmed or observed contexts. Making an action movie in a gallery can deconstruct real action movies.

The more recent film and video works of the Austrian artist Ursula Mayer also share a gaze on the human body in specific spaces. But, if Wannes Goetschalckx work somehow involves stripping down all the trappings in the frame to a series of home-made implements and objects, the Mayer’s practice is very much about the richness of the trappings, the strength of physical spaces to stand as a narrative character in their own right.

In this more recent body of work such as the three digital video piece “Trilogy” and her most recent 16mm work (intentionally shown as a DVD), Mayer consciously draws on the theories emerging from Italian cinema in the 1960’s and, more specifically the notion that film narratives or subjective experiences can be more powerfully constructed for a viewer by minimising the presence of actors and acting or even removing them completely. They explore the idea that carefully selected –and filmed- interiors can, themselves, become a fictional character in a film.

The practice, in Mayer’s work, is exploring the question of balance, the tipping point between the presence of the performer and the presence of the space. In the case of these works, each location is rather iconic either in terms of style, the objects contained within in and/or being built by a famous modernist architect; Aalto, Goldfinger. In all three films, she worked with the same actress, a new additional face appearing in the most recent work. The works, like her process, is evolutionary and creates a new meaning each time it loops.

In each of the films, the actions of the performer are somewhat stylised. Mayer worked with a choreographer to explore movements that would have the subtle stylisation of an actual choreography whilst not necessarily tipping into the realms of obvious dance. This action is almost one of interference: the performers are required to perform a series of physical movements that effectively prohibits them from showing us what we might understand to be good cinematic acting.

The result is one in which actions are never quite what we expect, in contrast to the distinctly cinematic qualities of the film loops themselves, each one making use of a camera language that we readily understand from the worlds of film, television or advertising. We are both prompted to wonder what is going on and, no doubt, to come up with the narratives ourselves.

Here too, the Bauschian lineage is strong; the strength of a taut gestural language to arrest and prompt our thinking or emotional experience is achieved by the location of physical movement within a space loaded with potential meanings. And as with Bausch – we should not overlook the Expressionism in Neo-Expressionism- the coolness and gloss of the surface does little to suppress our belief that something explosive might be going on at the same time.

This highly-charged emotional state is perhaps more clearly evident in other earlier works by Ursula Mayer such as the work “Fallen Imperial” which exists in various forms including video, installation and as a small edition artist’s book. In this work, Mayer constructs a performative exploration of an invented character –played by Mayer herself- of an upmarket call girl working the eponymous Imperial Hotel in Vienna. Whilst this work already anticipates the examination of relationships between human actions, identities and narratives to specific interior spaces, in Fallen Imperial, the undirected blunt emotional expressions of the avatar are much more directly expressed. All relate to and are heightened by the specific fading grandeur of the hotel.

Implied narratives of emotionally charged and romanticised spaces and locations are also an element of the Belgian artist Hans op de Beeck’s work. Not limited to a single practice or media, Hans op de Beeck has made works that include photography, drawing and installation amongst others, often with a strong conceptual approach defining how he approaches each project.

However, the manufacture or precise control of spaces and interiors –whether they contain people or not- has been a strand running through his practice. In many of his works, particular his more recent works, he appears to be finding a fusion of a kind of Romanticism and the architectural and design languages of the mundane and daily.

Earlier work has seen him explore the both the blatantly Romantic: photographs of Gothic maquettes or apocalyptic landscapes of denuded trees. And it has also seen him explore the kind of low-grade romanticsm of the banal; his works made in diner interiors that use the same sensibilities as Hopper’s pop-iconic paintings.

In more recent bodies of work her seems to be exploring a kind of fusion of these languages in order to come to a fresh resolution. The architectural and design elements of banal daily life such as supermarket or gas station forecourts, second-rate modernist architecture and the thwarted iconography of the festive – cheap fairground carousels- are altered and placed in unexpected relationships within installations. The installation itself exists in a dialogue with the ideas realised in other forms such as drawings or photographs. At times, the gothic resurfaces in the form of colour choices of moody atmospherics. And, in many ways, this is “the gothic” as it has come to stand after its appropriation into popular culture, at once deadly serious and genuinely emotive and rather embarrassingly kitsch and clichéd.

In an installation, also shown as residual photographic prints, a black carousel stands besides a black children’s garden swing set, a layer of snow, rich and evocative, laying over both and the ground. It remains a powerful, arresting and seductively beautiful image, despite the fact that the mechanisms of “the gothic” used to construct it are probably closer Tim Burton’s schmaltzy sanitised version of the gothic than they are to the genuine sexualised horror with which nineteenth century readers were meant to respond to the genre. In a sense, this dislocation seems to be the area of interest to the artist; not whether we can make comparable languages to preceding visual languages, but what occurs, even if we resist it, when hubris happens.

Like a number of contemporaries, Hans op de Beeck appears to be very interested in researching when one visual language becomes synonymous with another, when our deepest and most intense human experiences become no different from the stock language of a populist cinematic genre.

"It was a large room. Full of people. All kinds. And they had all arrived at the same building at more or less the same time. And they were all free. And they were all asking themselves the same question: What is behind that curtain?" – Laurie Anderson, United States 1 – 1V

If Ursula Mayer’s work seems to be moving in a direction in which it may no longer be necessary to use the human form as characters for a narrative, then both Janice McNab and Plinio Avila have been making work for some time in which spaces devoid of humans still appear to be telling us stories. Yet, both artists do so through different practices and from different starting points.

Janice McNab is an Amsterdam-based artist who approaches painting from a strongly conceptual position. In some ways, her choice to paint can be misleading. Although she is very clearly interested in painting and the end works that she shows arising from her practice take the form of paintings, photography and other means of image production are of just as much interest to her. In fact, they are crucial to the processes of her practice.

Janice McNab seems to be very strongly preoccupied with the nature of “reality” and “truth” and how we experience images in these terms. Working from research photographs that she takes herself and, no doubt, spending a lot of time looking at and thinking about other images, she engages in a kind of research that seeks to find the exact building blocks of the kinds of images we understand to represent “real” everyday life. Whether this distillation is to merely deconstruct and understand or to subvert and manipulate once the essential parts have been defined seems somewhat ambivalent. Whether her depictions of a crypto-documentary everyday life are a straightforward quest to comprehend and define or a fully cogniscient act of creating emotion-laden narrative potential, we may never know.

Undeniably, however, many of the works almost vibrate with the kind of emotive presence that only a kind of nakedness can bring. Reduced to their bare essentials, these representations -or arguably even misrepresentations- of everyday domestic elements and interiors, in theory, should say nothing, be pure documentary. Yet they seem to scream with a pent up rage or sink, forlorn and depressed, at the realisation of a life not lived. These are close-ups of the interiors of a Bergman or a Mike Leigh Film, the torrent of human emotion smothered beneath a pile of mass-produced textiles in a dimly lit room. The people, it seems, are no longer present. Nor do they need to be for us to understand the traces of their possible emotional states.

However, the real irony is in their formal layer. As pieces of visual research into painting, they also exist as beautiful objects. If we narrow our focus and look to the surface, avoid the potential emotive narratives, we find beautiful patterns and lines realised in paint. It is this aspect that enables us to see that one of her other concerns is the nature of painting itself.  She seems to be concerned with finding the point at which photographic realism and abstraction are interchangeable. And in many ways the works, like those of Wannes Goetschalckx are a clever trick, the narrow line to be walked where we, the audience, can still be given a whole “real” world through simple basic elements.

Janice McNab’s work is very much concerned with the nature of the image: how images are constructed and, conceptually, the attributes that we personally and socially assign to images. In the case of the Mexican artist Plinio Avila, the starting point often appears to be much more preoccupied with the spaces and how we perceive spaces, more specifically public spaces of one form or another.

Avila’s practice is not confined to painting and is, instead, an eclectic mix of painting, drawing, sculpture and installations. However, it might be fair to say that one of the strands that runs through his work is the application of applied or painted elements, whether this be in a far more traditional form such as paintings of oil on canvas or in the form of a kind of trompe l’oeil employed directly onto sculptures or parts of public spaces. The purpose of these may be to explore or distort the nature of an actual space –such as in his intervention in a public phone booth as part of a project for MARTa, Herford- or on the constructed space in a sculpture drawn from the architecture of domes.

Whether in these more sculptural and site-specific works or more traditional paintings, there does seems to be something of a preoccupation with the social meanings and attributes of public spaces running through his work. In the paintings, executed in a curt modernist quasi-representational style, the trappings of people are everywhere though they themselves may be absent. Occasionally there is a glimpse of peripheral activity; a suitcase on an airport terminal floor that appears to be being moved by a person just out of sight. Are they about to arrive? Or have they already left?

The trappings of human needs and consumption remain heavily present: chairs for them to sit on, shopping trolleys for them to pile food into, altars for their prayers. And, by implication –and the tone of the paintings themselves- we are offered the option of making up the narratives ourselves.

Frequently the works convey a sense that the specific time is very important in what we are seeing. We may never be certain of exactly what time it is or where we are in the narrative sequence, but they convey an expectation of transition.  We may not be certain if this is the moment just before the shopping trolleys are unlocked and the supermarket explodes into a frenzy of shoppers or whether, in fact, it’s just after they have been collected and neatly stored for the quiet hours of the night.  Are the banks of white plastic chairs empty in that moment before a flight arrives or just after departure? We can never be certain. However, we can be certain that, at some point, actual humans will change the places we are observing. 

And one of the ways they will do so is through consumption, a second strand of exploration running through Avila’s work. This has perhaps, become even more evident in his most recent work, a print catalogue entitled “Deseo Product Catalog 2006 – All I Need To Succeed in the Art World”. In this work, Avila has meticulously drawn consumer objects that he would like to own but cannot afford. The drawings themselves have then – like his humans- been taken away as a presence. Instead, they have been scanned and worked into a print design emulating the style of a shopping catalogue.

The absence of humans is also notable in the work of the Dutch painter Anneke Wilbrink. However, as with both Plinio Avila and Jancie McNab’s work, the evidence of their activity, even when the works become fairly abstracted is often strongly implied.

Anneke Wilbrink’s painting practice seems to exist at the confluence of a number of visual languages. The presence of a strong modernist painting tradition –both abstract and representational- is very much in evidence. But then so are other influences.

There is a strong sense of the architectural drawing and the kinds of illustrations that used to appear in newspapers and magazines, captioned with the term “artist’s vision”, usually to illustrate the promised delights of a shopping mall or housing development yet to be built. These were much more in evidence in brochures and newspapers before the arrival of digital illustration. There is also the sense of the production or set designer’s drawings; the gouaches and illustrations that were used to envision a movie set or film storyboard long before the actors would ever put foot onto the lot, again something increasingly rare as a phenomenon in the age of digital technology. These works could be the freehanded blueprint for a fantasy place to be realised on film or settings in which we could live out idyllic lives.

Anneke Wilbrink’s work also connects stylistically to the methods of designers working in the early cinema industry at the point at which the medium had developed enough to manipulate what was captured by the lens. Working in very free painting and drawing techniques, they would envision the contained environments in which a film’s action might unfold. It is not difficult to see how some of her works compare with sketches and gouaches from the 1920’s that would be realised on celluloid as sets for films such as Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”.

In such sketches, illustrations and even paintings prepared by early cinema designers – the founding fathers of mise en scène, many of whom had studied as visual artists – there is a new kind of visual shorthand that developed. Fluid and continuous line seemed to be a way of indicating the kind of moody lighting that would be necessary to convert the wood and canvas set into a fantastic celluloid experience; the palette and brushstrokes are used not as an instruction to the carpenters so much as a visual cue to the director to describe actions and emotions that need to be built into the future film’s totality for its impact to be realised. Drawing on the lessons of Expressionism –with which many of these practitioners were deeply connected- there is a sense that these illustrations and storyboards use a language that is less about the real objects that need to be built in the studio but much more, instead, about how they will need to be experienced by the eventual audience.

Of course, both of these visual languages and the contexts in which they arose share something of a Utopian tradition: they are the artist’s unrestricted vision of what a place could be before the blunt reality of human occupation has to be factored in. In this way, they share a connection to the practice of many other artists in recent years who have been making work that addresses the notions of Utopia both in an unbridled aspirational way or as a means of critiquing the political aspects of Utopian visions. A few, like Wilbrink, have worked in painting, whilst many have used other media such as installation, sculpture, video and digital prints.

In Wilbrink’s work, however, the concern seems to be more primarily focussed on researching the nature of how modernist painting languages have been able to realise these visions rather than the specific political content.  She paints places that become fantastic imagined places – even if the starting point is a very real location- through the style and nature of the painting itself.

As with Janice McNab’s work, there is an interest in finding the point at which they image still exists powerfully as a representation of a location or object whilst already dissolving into abstraction.

The cinematic experience of heightened emotion is intrinsic to the recent video work of the Polish artist Anna Baumgart.

Anna Baumgart is an artist living and working in Warsaw, perhaps best known for her deconstructed figurative sculptures and a body of video works in which gesture is explored.

Interestingly enough, the newer video work that involves the artist inserting herself into pre-existing cinema films arose in response to an invitation to make a work for a museum show entitled “Is It Real?”. Given the context of its production, is not difficult to understand that one of the main concerns of the work is the nature of “reality” in a world in which digital technology allows us to intervene and reconstruct apparently seamless versions of original material.

In this work, Baumgart has literally inserted herself into the action of a classic Russian-language melodrama, her face replacing that of the original actress as an emotionally charged scene unfolds on loop. What is particularly interesting about the work is her choice of film and scene. After all, the same practice of artist insertion has many applications, as we have seen in the work of a number of other contemporary artists, least of all Jemima and Dolly Brown who have made recent works exploring similar tropes. 

If Baumgart had wished to make a work that was purely about “reality” in the context of technology, there are many other source choices she could have made; many other means of raising the same questions about the nature of authenticity in the digital age.

But, she has chosen to use a specific Russian-language film and a very particular sequence from the film depicting a fevered scene between two characters that, even if we have no idea about the full movie, we assume to be lovers. The scene makes full use of a gamut of the original film’s mise en scène devices ranging from curtains billowing in the stormy wind to moody lighting and camera angles. We readily understand that, in its original context and its own day, these were the cinematic indicators for heightened emotion, a dramatic denouement. In Baumgart’s hands, these become double: they stand for both their original meaning and a certain post-feminist parody as she dutifully portrays a rather outmoded depiction of cinematic femininity.

Yet, taken as the experience of Baumgart’s work, the effect is one in which this context, this mise en scène raises questions not only about the nature of “reality” beyond that of the film’s apparent production. The effect is oddly romantic and expressionistic. Despite Baumgart’s clear conceptual conceit, we nonetheless take it at face value. We accept her as the heroine. And perhaps this is the second level of “reality” she challenges. Is she raising questions about herself as an artist and a woman? Despite her clear ability to raise critical questions about the nature of “reality”, is this a confession that some part of her still identifies unresistingly with this turbulent construct of male-female relationships? Even if she never gives a straightforward answer, one gets the feeling that she is rather amused that this could, in fact, still be a possibility. Questions about the nature of cinematic realities fuse with questions about the nature of personal emotional realities.

Beyond this still, it is also important to consider the choice of a Polish artist to use a classic Russian language film as the source material. Given the nature of the historic relationships between Russian and Polish cultures, this also brings a political layer into the work’s complex discussions. For an artist of Baumgart’s generation the impact of Soviet-era Russian culture is inevitably bound up in notions of nostalgia and communal memory, whether a positive or negative thing. Questions about one’s identity and how it is shaped are perhaps essential for both an artist and a society in which the transitions of recent years must constantly raise questions about how the “real” world is constructed around us.

The real world – or at least the “real” depictions of certain worlds- is a strand that runs through the practice of the Irish artist Mona Casey. Casey’s practice is broad, authoring works of her own in various media, collaborating on joint projects with fellow artist Paul McAree and a range of curatorial projects.

For the larger part, Mona Casey’s individual practice is based in the conceptual act of intervening in well-known images from art history. To be more precise, she produces individual prints and installation groups of prints where famous paintings, almost always those involving an element of portraiture, are the starting point. She selects these all too familiar art historical works – Vermeers, Holbeins, Manets- and then meticulously and with precision, removes the figures from the work, seamlessly reconstructing the locations and environments in which the great masters placed their iconic figures. Once the figures have been removed and the interiors and landscapes have miraculously grown together where they had once been obscured, the works are shown as  digital prints. In essence, Mona Casey distils famous works of art to their mise en scène; to the locations –with all their devices of meaning and atmospherics- in which the famous artists placed their equally famous representations of people.

There are many levels on which we can understand the works, least of all on the simplistic level of being impressed by her skill and determination to reproduce a credible join in the style of the original painter.  But, this element is sublimated. The choice to show the work as flat digital prints denies the fetishistic qualities that we have accorded painting; its textures and its status. We all too quickly and easily accept the work and glance at it as if it were another printed facsimile in our image saturated world. And of course this is part of the practice. We are expected to question the production of images and the priority and status we accord them.

Another aspect of the practice is that it researches the nature of communal visual memory as affected by western art history. These images are quiet. They have been denuded of the central dramatic figures for which they are largely remembered. So, do we still recognise the works? Do we readily recognise the reputedly iconic interiors of Vermeer once his figures have been removed? Are Holbein’s deft landscapes as powerful in our subconscious as his heavily brocaded figures of grandeur? And do we share the memorable mountain top view of Friedrich as readily as the back of his figure taking in the vista?

Casey’s work poses interesting questions about our visual heritage that takes in the biology of visual memory as much as an understanding of painting craft. It certainly prompts questions about the relational way in which we remember visual objects; the way in which our memory needs to measure one seen object against a series of others for it to effectively enter our memory. But it also prompts us to ask questions about the conscious decisions of painters when constructing images to an intended visual impact. Do paintings stand alone as beautiful and memorable landscapes once the famous figures are removed? And, if they don’t, is that simply because for hundreds of years, someone’s bum has been in the way, disallowing us to understand the work as a landscape in its own right? Or have painters made conscious decisions to ensure that landscapes and interiors would never upstage the dramatic figures they wished for us to remember?

At its core, Mona Casey’s work underscores the debate about mise en scène and its relationship to our visual world: is the dramatic presence of people as viable on a truly empty set or are all the other elements that fill the frame, inevitably unnoticed, what give meaning, mood and mode to the world around us? 

Ken Pratt