Jana La Brasca is a graduate student at University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Art and Art History. The following is the full text of “Space, Place, Trace: The Structures of Feeling and Hubbard/Birchler’s Giant“, a paper she presented as part of a seminar on art historical methods. The film at the center of her thesis is part of Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s Sound Speed Marker exhibition, which originated at Ballroom Marfa, and is now on view at the Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston.

The exhibition catalogue, cited throughout the following paper, is available from Ballroom Marfa, and is distributed by D.A.P.

Giant, 2014
Production still
High definition video with sound

Space, Place, Trace
Structures of Feeling and Hubbard/Birchler’s Giant

Jana La Brasca
6.1.15

————————————————————————————————————-

Images fill the new catalog of Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s exhibition Sound Speed Marker, which opened at Ballroom Marfa in 2013 and returns to Texas this month with its installation at Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum. The pages of this sumptuous volume contain reproductions of archival materials informing the artists’ research, installation views of both the Ballroom show and Hubbard/Birchler exhibitions elsewhere, and production photographs. Several sections–comprised of back-to-back pages of full-bleed, uncaptioned stills—provide an uninterrupted visual flow that begins to approximate the powerfully sensual experience of the filmic installations that make up the Sound Speed Marker trilogy.

In Grand Paris, Texas (2009), Movie Mountain (Méliès) (2011), and Giant (2014), Hubbard and Birchler investigate cinema as a vocabulary of memory embedded in consciousness and landscape. Each work is projected on one more screen than the last using an increasingly disjunctive visual language, departing progressively from traditional documentary forms. At Ballroom Marfa, visitors entered a gallery that was more like a theater—cool darkness and ample seating fostered a transportatively cinematic experience that was much more than visual.

Installation View, Giant, 2014
Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler
High Definition Video with Sound
Duration: 30 min.
Synchronized 3-Channel Projection
Courtesy of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin
Commissioned by Ballroom Marfa
Photography © Fredrik Nilsen

To give oneself over to these works was multisensory, bodily even. Carefully orchestrated sound and overwhelmingly crisp projections generated an atmosphere of intensified presence. Simultaneously, a sustained rhythm of long, slow shots across all three works dilated time in a way that attracts immersive attention as it opens space for a viewer’s own mental activity[1].

While a printed page could never capture the body-mind resonances of experiencing these works in person, the images in the catalog capture a good deal of what they convey visually—their clarity, their chromatic opulence, their graphic strength. Yet at the same time, the pictures show the fuzzed edges of motion blur, the momentary softening among planes within a varying depth of field. Anyone who has ever attempted to grab a still from a work of moving imagery can relate to the tension these images so subtly illustrate. Even within the apparently exact moment one wishes to pause and analyze, a continuum of motion offers a nearly infinite set of possible representations. In this way, the pages of the Sound Speed Marker catalog themselves echo the trilogy’s investigation of the instability of perception, memory, and document.

In the interview with the artists in the catalog, Hubbard said, “The relationship of film to memory is incredibly expansive…one of film’s most fundamental attributes…is that cinema always exists only in the head of the viewer; it’s a direct result of our perceptual ability to memorize still images in fast succession and create an illusion of movement.”[2] Here, the artist describes a delay between film and viewer akin to the softnesses printed upon the pages I describe. In Grand Paris, Texas, Movie Mountain (Méliès), and Giant, the interstitial spaces of delay between event and index, index and representation, representation and perception are active in the same way the images in the catalog are. Such slight ruptures may be productively thought alongside Raymond Williams’ notion of “structures of feeling.”

The phrase forms the title of a short section in Marxism and Literature, where Williams argues against the expression of culture and society in a “habitual past tense” or experience as a “finished product.”[3] Culture at large and personal experience are intertwined, he says, and their relationship always remains unfixed. History and consciousness blend together in an ever-emergent, continuously unfolding present. Dominant culture determines structures of feeling that at once shape and fail to capture lived experience. The ways structures of feeling change is of particular interest to Williams: “although they are emergent or pre-emergent, they do not have to await definition, classification, or rationalization before they exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action.”[4] In this view, works of art occupy a very important role in the social realm. As more or less “explicit and finished forms” whose “inherent process” must be made “present” through reception, art can at once reference existing cultural or social norms (understood as fixed or past) and indicate future formations. Thus, encounters between artists, objects, and viewers are loci of revolutionary possibility, where new narratives and epistemological norms may germinate and take root.[5] Hubbard and Birchler’s works in Sound Speed Marker do precisely this. As they investigate ideological and physical relics of the past, they promote a special way of being (in the) present. This essay will focus on Giant, the trilogy’s final chapter, dwelling on its engagement with different structures of feeling while keeping its generative delays intact.

Giant is driven narratively by two documents bookending the George Stevens 1956 desert epic of the same name. These very different documents are brought to life in two geographically and temporally distant scenes. One observes a pretty secretary in a 1950s Warner Bros. production office in Burbank, California, who types the contract that will allow the studio to enter private ranch land, use its livestock, and build the structure that will serve to represent the Reata mansion (home of the Benedicts, played by Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor in the movie).

Installation View, Giant, 2014
Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler
High Definition Video with Sound
Duration: 30 min.
Synchronized 3-Channel Projection
Courtesy of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin
Commissioned by Ballroom Marfa
Photography © Fredrik Nilsen

Crisp, long, and steady close and medium shots of the woman, her typewriter, her desk, her ashtray combine with magnified diegetic sound to re-enact the creation of the contract in an immediately tactile way. The other scene tracks a present-day film crew investigating what is left over from Stevens’ film’s production: the wooden skeleton of the three-sided mansion façade Warner Bros. built nearly six decades ago. Close and medium shots and an intensely textured diegetic soundtrack capture creatures, plants, and changing climactic conditions surrounding the building in stunning detail.

Giant, 2014
Production still
High definition video with sound

Sound is often carried over transitions between shots of the two environments. The imagery on each screen constantly oscillates between continuity and fragmentation. The effect is a mixing, a gentle scrambling of time and space, upsetting the linearity of traditional narrative cinema while using its own visual cues: the romanticized landscape of the Wild West, a beautiful woman’s face, and an actual artifact of Hollywood film production.

In the “before” and “after” states suggested by Giant‘s two settings, the house structure lives at the core of this narrative. However, the condition in which it was built to be seen—as the Hollywood film’s Victorian manse standing uncannily in the desert—is never shown. Instead, it is represented by traces. Rather than focus on Warner Bros.’ intentional product, the traces constituted by the paper contract and the remaining wooden frame acknowledge the mutability of form over time, evoking the ever emergent present Williams describes. In the parlance of George Kubler’s History of Things, the structure functions as a “signal” carried forth through time: the film set “is not only a residue of an event but its own signal, directly moving other makers…”[6] In dialogue with while also standing apart from the signal of the 1956 Giant, Hubbard and Birchler build a lyrical narrative which itself resists “finished product” status.[7] Rather than offering revelations of graded complication based on a linear narrative progression, the work circles around its implied subject. That Giant, like many of Hubbard/Birchler’s video works, is shown on a loop heightens this circling–cinematic tropes of beginning, middle, and end are subverted by an open, breathing narrative form that can be accessed equally at any time. As Birchler has said of other works shown in this way, “the loop is the climax.”[8] In the loop, each moment is equally important as the last and the next, providing a generously recalcitrant interpretive space for a conscious viewer.

Hubbard/Birchler’s oeuvre is characterized by suggestion and mystery, which has been called a “poetics of absence,” “enigmatic imaginative potential,” or in the artists’ words, a conscious utilization of “the wrong time.”[9] This “wrong time” is suggested not only in Giant but in two other works which use traces to strong effect: Eight(2001) and House with Pool (2004). In each, paper plates, napkins and nibbled upon snacks depict a party just ended (fig. 9, 10). The unattended birthday party in Eight is drowned by heavy rain. Of such remains, in her essay on House with Pool, Maja Neef writes, “the camera treats the objects like evidence that might provide clues to their meaning: what can we see in them, what might we glean from them?”[10] This presentation of clues is an invitation to our inner detective, but without didactic narrative resolution (or even any verbal language) it also firmly establishes the viewer as an “emancipated stakeholder” in the making of the clues’ meaning.[11] In the preface to the catalog of the 2002 exhibition Wild Walls, the authors write that in an age of poststructural freedom, “it is only logical that Hubbard and Birchler tell stories that are played out on the periphery, which draw our attention to the unremarkable and unostentatious.” [12] I would argue that what happens in Eight, House With Pool, and Sound Speed Marker is in fact even more radical: these stories are actually played out on their own peripheries, doing more than simply “drawing attention to the unremarkable.” The implication is rather that “the unremarkable” is independently charged with meaning and potential, whether or not we are paying attention.

During our interview, Hubbard said, “We knew that what interested us about the shell of this house was that under the right conditions it becomes like an acoustic instrument, it’s more of a sound-maker than anything else at this point.”[13] The artists shot at the site for two years, so that the film documents not only the great diversity of the Chihuahuan desert climate, but also the powerful sounds the structure makes as it creaks and shifts.[14] By returning to the site for so long, resolutely listening, the artists truly gave this structure its time to speak. In an interview for Bomb magazine with artist Irina Arnaut, Birchler said, “In our work we’ve often returned to the idea of listening in different ways. We are very interested in how listening looks.”[15] The first human that appears in Giant is a female sound recordist, shown from two angles, pressing her ear against one of the poles of the wooden structure.

Installation View, Giant, 2014
Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler
High Definition Video with Sound
Duration: 30 min.
Synchronized 3-Channel Projection
Courtesy of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin
Commissioned by Ballroom Marfa
Photography © Fredrik Nilsen

She walks slowly, under and around it, her act of listening embodied through her performance, high-tech equipment, and actual role in the work’s production. In the Burbank scene, the secretary also assumes an attitude of receptivity, as she sometimes pauses her work to look out the window and look and listen to something happening outside the frame. At certain moments, crosscutting with the desert scene suggests that the secretary is somehow dreaming of or imagining the decayed future of the structure her work is helping to make. But the exact relation between the two women remains unclear–in both cases, the audience is not given total access to what is being heard; in Birchler’s words, it is rather “left as an image of listening as her own privileged, intimate space.”[16]

That these listeners are women is crucial. Their attentiveness is self-possessed. While they may be lovely to look at—they are shown close-up, large in scale, and in sensuous detail– their behavior reads as otherwise occupied by the “privileged” and “intimate” space of listening. Rather than inviting a voyeuristic or fetishizing gaze, they demonstrate what the audience could or should do both inside the space of the installation and beyond. These women are “makers of meaning,” rather than “bearers of meaning,” to reverse Laura Mulvey’s distinction.[17] Moreover, they physically embody a potential viewer Mulvey does not acknowledge in the films she describes, one that projects a critical female gaze: complex, private, and individually specific. The sound recordist wields a microphone, sometimes referred to as a “dead cat” (fig. 13). As a functional object, a listening machine, it reinforces the perceptive agency of its user: Hubbard describes it as “a placeholder for some kind of sensitivity or listening and being silent while listening.”[18]

Dead Cat on Movie Mountain, Sunrise, 2011
Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler
Diptych, each image 43.5 x 54.75 inches
Courtesy of Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin

According to Jane Tompkins’ “Ontology of the Western,” in the vocabulary of the western genre in film and literature, uncommunicativeness is the domain of men and a source of power within the “void” landscape of the desert.[19] Tompkins argues the western’s anti-civilization ethos sweeps verbosity away, that expression of belief equates to illusion, that speech clouds reality. She writes, “…because the western is in revolt against a culture, perceived as female, where the ability to manipulate symbols confers power, the western equates power with ‘not language.’ And not language it equates with being male.”[20] If using language to relate with others suggests the speaker’s incompleteness, then quietude renders man sovereign and impenetrable, and the hero blends formally with the equally “blank” landscapes around him.

The famous last shot from John Ford’s The Searchers, released the same year as Stevens’ Giant, represents this inside/outside speech/silence gendered dynamic with graphic succinctness (image: still from The Searchers). Having returned from his epic journey to rescue his niece, Wayne’s stoic Ethan Edwards is framed by the porch of his former family home. He looks inside for a moment, silently turning in retreat from domestic comfort as a slow ballad plays: “A man will search his heart and soul/ go searchin’ way out there/ his peace of mind he knows he’ll find/ but where, O Lord, but where…” In Hubbard and Birchler’s Giant, female actors co-opt this privileged—or even heroicized—space of speechlessness, yet their relational capacity remains intact. Where Edwards’ silent retreat represents “THE END,” the sound recordist and secretary’s silence constitutes generative perpetual beginning.

In both the Hollywood Giant and The Searchers, speechlessness also veneers certain horrifying truths. Where Ethan Edwards has borne witness to the (heavily racialized) violence of war–both the Civil War and the conquest of the Native American territories–the silence of Giant’s women may also bear witness to the manifold exploitations of the mythic and real landscapes of the American West. The specter of the boom and bust cycle and the energies expended in search of and generated by the extraction of oil are structures of feeling silently haunting the characters in Hubbard and Birchler’s Giant. In Arnaut’s interview, she likens Hollywood’s portrayal of Texas “as an untamed landscape independent of the rule of law” to the process of oil prospecting, “trying to extract from the setting whatever they could.”[21] Indeed, as both mythical place and an actual geographic setting, West Texas has in recent history been exploited on a massive scale. For James Dean’s character in Giant (1956), Jett Rink, the land and the petrochemical reserves underneath lead to great wealth, but they also lead to alcoholism, excess, even madness. Rink’s deep-seated racial prejudice is a defining feature of his character. Oil, wealth, privilege, bigotry, and violence coalesce in Rink’s behavior in a way that remains highly relevant in the present day. In their alchemical reinvigoration of the Reata mansion as artifact, Hubbard and Birchler’s film crew echo but subvert the role of the prospector by seeking and extracting ephemeral impressions rather than physical matter, which they in turn deploy to create aesthetic products we may metabolize into energy without depleting their mass or polluting the atmosphere.

Associations with the western genre and prospecting, which inhere in the house structure in Giant even as it stands stripped bare, are magnified when the works are situated in place, fulfilling cinema’s desire to “bring things closer.”[22] After its time in Marfa, Sound Speed Marker went on to Dublin and Houston, but it was particularly “well sited at Ballroom Marfa, just down the road from Donald Judd’s utopia,”[23] and from its shooting locations. Marfa is a palimpsest, as are most places, but this quality is uniquely emphasized by Judd’s “permanent” art installations maintained by the Chinati and Judd Foundations, which attempt to remain frozen in time while also preserving the town’s even deeper military history. Likewise, each new exhibition at Ballroom Marfa reanimates its spaces, but its name and very structure always gesture back to its previous life as a local dance hall.

By virtue of their proximity to the Ballroom Marfa exhibition of Sound Speed Marker, Judd’s Specific Objects also resonate with these Hubbard/Birchler’s Giant. In his Untitled (15 Works in Concrete), rectangular prisms are assembled in fifteen configurations of between two and six units on the true north-south axis of the parade grounds of the former Fort DA Russell. Walking among them, the works might suggest furniture or architecture, but in their blankness they also deny this status, so that the work is not only open in a physical sense, but also an interpretive one. Likewise, Giant’s looping structure, its lack of dialogue, and visual immersiveness invite engagement without requiring en extrinsic intellectual framework.

Judd’s work has been said to shift the focus of sculpture from form to space. In a potentially relatable way, both the artists and curators have suggested the sculptural qualities of Hubbard and Birchler’s filmic works. They have used the phrases “slipperiness of space” and “spatializing cinema.”[24] In the Ballroom Marfa installation, more or less traditional “white cube” gallery spaces were transformed to accommodate Movie Mountain and Giant, with special attention to achieving maximal darkness and sound resonance. The floor, varnished wood, reflected projections in ghostly pale blue.

Installation View, Giant, 2014
Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler
High Definition Video with Sound
Duration: 30 min.
Synchronized 3-Channel Projection
Courtesy of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin
Commissioned by Ballroom Marfa
Photography © Fredrik Nilsen

The quality of the sonic and visual projections, amplified by exhibition design elements, made these works feel almost hyper-real. With Judd’s outdoor works in Marfa, the vibration of concrete, high desert dust, pale plant life, and dry bright white light has a similar effect. My comparison between Giant and Judd’s untitled works in concrete addresses a formal similarity between rectangular, framed views of the West Texas desert and a mutual emphasis on expressing or generating a specific type of space. Moreover, for residents of and visitors to Marfa during the period of Ballroom’s Sound Speed Marker exhibition, these works might have been seen within days or hours of each other, so that each may have mutually structured the feeling of the other. Both mark inside and outside in relation to the human body, and both celebrate site specificity with eloquent formal succinctness. Such large-scale, immersive aesthetic experiences at the intersection of art, architecture, and landscape define the unique feeling that makes Marfa such a special place to see art.

I also choose to think these works together to highlight a key difference between them in the ethos of mark making in the landscape. Movie Mountain (Méliès), reaches its topographic and narrative climax when the film crew actually reaches the summit of “Movie Mountain.” A male sound recordist marks the peak with a microphone. Here, the artists approach and deny the heroic trope of territorial demarcation in a single gesture, crystallizing Hubbard and Birchler’s approach in Sound Speed Marker. Rather than as a void to measure or to make marks upon, here the landscape is interpreted as an ephemeral archive of lived experience. The microphone is not a monument but an instrument of reception. With the planting of the microphone on Movie Mountain’s peak, the climax of inquiry is more inquiry, it is an ever-unfolding process, the “generative immediacy” Williams attempts to recover.[25]

With each point of contact or comparison presented here, I have attempted to show how existing structures of feeling—cinematic narrative tropes, a gendered gaze, the Western genre, land use practices, Minimalist sculpture—are woven into into Hubbard/Birchler’s Giant. I have also attempted to describe the delicately disjunctive ways the artists mobilize these structures of feeling to propose a new kind of relationship to memory, time, perception, and landscape. Giant and Sound Speed Marker imagine a relationship with history and place that is sensitive, observant, and engaged. The importance of curiosity and receptivity can only increase as we race toward ever more complex ways of seeing and being. We can imagine in the tiny blurs of the images in the Sound Speed Marker catalog–where Super HD frame rates race too fast to be pinned all the way down by a still image–a hopeful point of departure, a fertile space of imaginative possibility.

ENDNOTES

[1] “Like the literary essay, their work at its best holds belief and suspension of belief in productive tension, allowing for what the artists have described as a process of moving between absorption and de-absorption, of full engrossment in an artwork and of self-consciousness regarding the way that artwork acts to foster it.” Jeffrey Kastner, “Centers of Attention: Four Essays for Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler,” in Sound Speed Marker, exh. cat., Marfa: Ballroom Marfa, 2014, 120.
[2] Inka Graeve Ingelmann, “Films and Funerals: A Conversation with Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler, in Sound Speed Marker, exh. cat., Marfa: Ballroom Marfa, 2014, 216.
[3] Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128-135.
[4] Williams, 132.
[5] Williams, 133.
[6] George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962), 21.
[7] Williams, 128.
[8] Maja Neef, “House with Pool. A Poetics of Absence,” in House with Pool. exh. cat., Basel: C. Merian, 2004, 85.
[9] Neef,, 99-110; Kaiser, 91.; preface to Wild Walls catalog, 5; Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler, interview by Irina Arnaut, BOMB Magazine, July 14, 2014. Online.
[10] Neef, 100.
[11] “emancipated stakeholder,” is from Wild Walls catalog, 49.
[12] Preface to Wild Walls, 7.
[13] Teresa Hubbard interviewed by the author, October 2014.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Arnaut, BOMB, [my emphasis].
[16] Ibid.
[17] Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975): 6-18.
[18] Teresa Hubbard interviewed by the author, October 2014.
[19] Jane Tompkins, “Language and Landscape: An Ontology for the Western,” Artforum 28.6 (February 1990): 94-99
[20] Tompkins, 97.
[21] Arnaut, BOMB.
[22] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” (1935). Edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn in Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1969, 217-251.
[23] Grant Johnson, “Critics Pick: Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler,” Artforum, October 19, 2014. Online.
[24] Andrea Karnes, “Of Two Minds,” in No Room to Answer. exh. cat., Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2008, 10-32.
[25] Williams, 133.

WORKS CITED

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” (1935). Edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn in Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1969, 217-251.

Giant, directed by George Stevens (1956; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2003), DVD.

Hubbard, Teresa and Alexander Birchler. Interview by Irina Arnaut, BOMB Magazine, July 14, 2014.

Hubbard, Teresa. Interview by Jana La Brasca, October 30, 2014.

Hubbard, Teresa and Beate Söntgen. “Dealing with Fear: An email-conversation after the Symposium’s Talk.” Akademie Schloss Solitude Symposium, 2010. http://www.hubbardbirchler.net/publications/interviews/DEALING_WITH_FEAR.pdf Accessed 12.7.14

Johnson, Grant. “Critics Pick: Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler.” Artforum, October 19, 2014.

Kaiser, Phillipp. “At the limits of Photography: Cinematic Elements in the Work of Teresa Hubbard/Alexander Birchler.” In Wild Walls. exh. cat., Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2001, 89-141.

Karnes, Andrea. “Of Two Minds.” In No Room to Answer. 10-32. exh. cat., Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2008.

Kubler, George. The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1962.

Lippke, Andrea Coddington, ed. Sound Speed Marker. exh. cat. Marfa: Ballroom Marfa, 2014.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975): 6-18.

Neef, Maja. “House with Pool. A Poetics of Absence.” In House with Pool. exh. cat., Basel: C. Merian, 2004, 99-110.

Tompkins, Jane. “Language and Landscape: An Ontology for the Western.” Artforum 28.6 (February 1990): 94-99.

Williams,Raymond. “Structures of Feeling.” In Marxism and Literature, 128-135. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.