Moving Pictures: The persistence of locomotion

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Notes

¹ Huxley, a strong supporter of Darwin’s theories, was Lecturer in Natural History (1854) at the Royal School of Mines and the Royal College of Science (later unified as the Imperial College of Science and Technology).

² Charles Darwin wrote his ‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection’ in 1859 and published his photo-documents ‘The Expression of The Emotions in Man and Animal’ in 1872, a decade and a half before Muybridge’s main body of work. Darwin’s photographs, like Muybridge’s, attempted to capture what he called the ‘fleeting nature’ of bodily dispositions (in this case facial expressions) while avoiding the ‘interference of the observer’s own reactions’ and preconceptions (Poignant 1992: 56).

³ Jeremy Bentham’s concept for a utopian penitentiary, published posthumously in 1843 is now well known through the writings of Michel Foucault. In Bentham’s vision, prisoner bodies do not cast shadows upon a screen (as in the Wayang Kulit Malay ‘leather shadow-puppet’ performance or in Plato’s cave). Rather, they are backlit, ‘exemplary’ shadows, to be seen by the guards and their fellow inmates in much the same manner that figures appear in a camera obscura or that the architecture of his residence itself appeared in Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s ‘View from the Window at Le Gras’, the first recorded photograph from around 1826 <http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/permanent/ wfp/(7/11/06)>. Bentham’s image of the ideal prison was itself a grand camera obscura from the beginnings of the photographic age. The proportions of the anthropometric photograph twenty years later were prefigured by Bentham’s proportionate notions of moral behaviour and legislation, which, ironically, was then also applied in the Asian colonies. For more on Bentham’s legislative and penal theories, see his An Introduction to The Principles of Morals and Legislation(1789), and for more on Benthamite panopticism, discipline and deterrence, see Foucault’s Discipline and Punish(1979).

⁴ Marey’s chronophotographic rifle was based on an 1874 photographic revolver invented by the astrophysicist Jules Janssen (Dagognet 1992: 91–6).

⁵ Bender and Wellbery describe their modification of Bhaktin’s ‘chronotopes’ (which he in turn borrowed from Einstein) as ‘models or patterns’ by which we continuously and repeatedly ‘fabricate’ or ‘improvise’ time at ‘multiple individual, social and cultural levels’ from ‘an already existing repertoire of cultural forms and natural phenomena’. In short, all conventions of temporal phenomena are ‘chronotypes’. The purpose of the term is to indicate that time is not only an observable phenomenon but is also a convention of representation (Bender and Wellbery 1991: 1–15).

⁶ The barred Nation It/Self, alienated from its eternal self-generation, becomes a liminal form of social representation, a space that is internally marked by cultural difference and the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities, and tense cultural locations. (Bhabha 1990: 299) Bhaba’s description of the impact of performative syntax on the grammars of national identity is largely presumed by Appadurai’s analysis nine years later. Another extrapolation on the theme of the internally divided nation is found in Rey Chow’s notion of the ‘double gaze’ in her discussion of the Chinese state’s response to the films of Zhang Yimou. Chow argues that for the postcolonial Asian subject there are always two gazes: that of the state, ‘and the world’s, especially the West’s, orientalism’ (Chow 1995: 170). The state returns to that moment of modernist self-invention, but with an awareness that it is under incessant scrutiny. The gaze of the post-colonial state is in this manner always doubled: the voyeur also an object of the voyeurism of another.

⁷ In the case of some conceptual works of art, such as those of Sol Lewitt, Denis Oppenheim, Richard Long, Cheo Chia Hiang and other conceptual artists, instructions for the installation of the work function as the work.

⁸ This rich topic cannot be dealt with here. These technologies include infrared video, optical arrays in video games, surveillance technologies and the World Wide Web itself, among many others. The field of performance studies today holds areas in common with social network analysis and netwar techniques used by military analysts. For more on the latter, see Arquilla and Ronfeldt (2001).

⁹ This late-century arrival distinguishes it categorically from theatrical street performance, which saw an efflorescence in the early postwar years, following the ideological trajectory of liberation and class struggles. For more on this, see Eugène Van Erven (1992).

¹⁰ The Station Flexible X group, Dresden, and I jointly curated this satellite event of the 2000 Werkleitz Biennale.

¹¹ Strikingly, neither of the two train operators nor the police attempted to communicate with Heng. They perhaps assumed that as an apparent foreigner she could not speak German, or that, as a performer, she would not be able to break out of character. For her part, Heng made no effort to communicate with either the officials or the organizers during her performance.

¹² One of the important participants and organizers in the development of the early performance art scene in Singapore, as a participant in the Artists Village collective, Amanda Heng has addressed the traditional positions and passages of Asian women in the home, their endless repetitive work, their displacement as migrant workers, female infanticide, abortion, aging and tourism. She deploys performance as a means of raising social consciousness and, in one photographic series, to reveal the literally naked female subject as the momentary revelation of matrilineal affinity and encoding.

¹³ Heng flew Lufthansa between Singapore and Dresden under funding of the Werkleitz Gesellschaft. Capital flow enters the production, reception and circulation of this writing now in this British journal. An American, living then in Australia, now in Kuala Lumpur, I was the former curator of that event and was also contracted and transported in by the Werkleitz Gesellschaft.

¹⁴ An artist and a gallery manager of the 5th Passage Contemporary Art Space were arrested in 1993, and for the following decade performance art was barred from being licenced, displayed in public or granted public funding.

¹⁵ Bhabha writes of them: ‘[colonials, post colonials, migrants, minorities – wandering peoples who will not be contained within the Heim of the national culture and its unisonant discourse but are themselves the marks of the shifting boundary that alienates the frontiers of the modern nation’ (1990: 315).

¹⁶ Hsieh obtained citizenship in 1988. For video documentation and more detailed information concerning his work, see Hsieh DVDROM (2000), a useful video document of Hsieh speaking about his work at the Werkleitz Biennale(2000) during his first trip out of the United States, see Werkleitz Gesellschaft (2000). Other useful sources include Langenbach (2002), Heathfield (2003) and Ward (2006),

¹⁷ Hsieh, originally from Taiwan, has used different names at different times in his career, mirroring his immigrant status. He began with the flagrantly Americanized Sam Hsieh when hiding from the Immigration officials. In late 1981, he more confidently began to use Tehching Hsieh, thereby reinstating his personal name while maintaining the American convention of placing the family name last. Hsieh received permanent residence under an amnesty program in 1987, followed by (dual) citizenship in 1992.

¹⁸ Hsieh recorded 134 missed clock punchings (1.54%) out of the year’s total of 8760 punchings: (I)n 365 days, I punched 24 times per day, that was 8760 times. There were 93 missing-punch times (not in the film), 31 latepunch times (in the film), 10 early-punch times (in the film). I had about 10 times mechanic problems, I had punched records on time cards, but the images couldn't be caught by camera. the 16mm film projector runs 24 frames per second, but the speed of the digital version is 25 frames per second. (T)he length of the film suppose to be about 6 minutes 4 seconds, yet I've checked out and found out the length [of the NTSC transfer] is about 6 minutes and8 seconds… I don't know why. (Hsieh, email correspondence 10 April 2007)’.

¹⁹ Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Scientific Management theory was developed in 1911. Deployed by Henry Ford in his Model-T factories, Taylor’s efficiency studies had global repercussions. He continued to theorize labour and management systems into the 1940s with the publication of Scientific Management (1947), a new compilation of earlier writings.