Marion Coutts

 

I shot my first moving images in Rome and epic was the first edited work I made. It was filmed on a very basic Super 8 camera, no zoom, no light meter, bought on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. The walk taken by the horse in epic was my usual route home from the Piazza del Popolo, up through the Borghese Gardens, past the Galoppatoio, and on to the British School. I walked a great deal during my time there; the city is full of horses, statues in squares, in fountains, glimpsed high up on buildings. The bearers of the horse were three historians at the School and a Roman artist. It was a very hot day and I ran after them, shooting what I could. Having the material meant I had to learn how to put it together. That came later.

 

 

Parks and galleries share certain paradoxical characteristics, being places of both tranquillity and circulation. Designed primarily for the public to move through, they also offer solitary resting points, allowing the illusion that what you see is for you alone. Although both changed their character substantially in the nineteenth century, the first parks and picture collections were founded by kings and princes. The untitled and unwashed were admitted only as a privilege, not as a right, and with an expectation of appropriate behaviour. Nevertheless, people very quickly caught on to the pleasures of parks, notably the offer they make for the use of undirected and unsupervised time.

Marion Coutts’ Everglade is a sculptural installation made up of several standard elements – the physical set-up is not meant to be invisible - but at its centre is a series of views of parkland. The London parks shown are well established with broadleaved trees all of which possess an eighteenth-century aspect, reflecting the period in which they were created.

 

The conception of the piece is a sequence of still images within which movement and change occurs. It ought not to surprise us when the images move, since they draw on the convention of eighteenth century engraved vignettes, or cut-outs, which follow the profiles of the trees and an area of parkland defined in a self-sufficient disc. Within the image the wind ruffles the foliage and the light changes, but without the reference point of the sun or sky, it is difficult for the viewer to understand the source of these changes. Figures in the landscape, mostly single, move along the paths (or on one occasion across the grass directly towards you), but they are never seen entering or making an exit from the image, neither do they come near enough to show their faces. Rules are in force, evidently. The figures remain tied to a particular scale dictated by the view, and therefore come to seem rather like figures trapped in snowdomes or like characters from desert island cartoons.

Everglade effectively unlocks a naivety lurking in our response. We are familiar with the conventions of still and moving images, but by a simple trick of combining the two, the artist endows these landscape compositions with life, enabling them to become pictures that move. Something about the set-up – the tall stand for the projector, the free-standing screen behind which we might walk – emphasizes this naivety in our response by promising knowledge or a demonstration of exactly how the image was produced. (Not unsurprisingly, as Marion Coutts works primarily in three dimensions, her moving image work is often framed within a sculptural language.) The views themselves are isolated for study on a larger area of white screen. They also fade away to white for longer than feels quite comfortable. Sometimes the same view recurs, but on this occasion, empty of the figures previously spied.   Everglade evidences an interest in the psychological puzzle of what goes and what stays.  In this sense it shares similarities with Gary Hill’s video work Tall Ships (1992), where figures appear to approach you, inspect you, and walk away again, removing your usual control over the act of viewing.
           
Everglade is not an experience with a beginning or an end, other than the one the viewer makes. And frustratingly, there is nowhere to sit down. Nevertheless, it creates a place to be. You have to stand, your circulation around the gallery temporarily arrested, to find all this out.

 

 

Coutts’ new digital work, Mountain (2004) records the daily routine of staff setting the fellow’s table for lunch in the Combination Room at St John’s, where lunch is served for college fellows and their guests. In a performance that takes up to two hours to complete, the table is laid with the same precision every weekday lunch-time. Preparations for dinner in the Great Hall are even more elaborate. Seemingly out of kilter with modern dining arrangements, this meal time ritual is nevertheless part of a complex social system in which dining provides a social focus for University and College activities.

 

A characteristically simple piece, Mountain is shot in black and white, with the camera fixed in a position that renders a sharp perspective down the length of an extraordinarily long (20 metre) table, mirrored above by that of a vast stucco ceiling. Coutts has barely intervened in the footage beyond editing it down to an 18 minute sequence that is looped to run continuously, the end of the task forever begetting the beginning. As the name suggests Mountain presents the task at hand as an epic endeavour: two waiting staff move slowly and repeatedly up and down the table, becoming smaller and smaller in scale as they proceed further from the lens, methodically laying candlesticks, glasses, cruet and cutlery. The artist’s only other manipulation was to mirror the image vertically, so that one half mirrors the other. Symmetry is inscribed in the structure of the room to begin with, in the paired windows, the mirroring of table and ceiling, and patterns that echo from the stucco plasterwork and wood panelling to the etched glassware, while reflections and sculptural forms repeat throughout the scene.

 

In earlier works such as Assembly (2000), Coutts explored natural order and pattern as a metaphor for behaviour. In Everglade (2003), which uses historical conceits of landscaped parkland and the vignette format, and now in Mountain, Coutts takes the explicitly man-made conventions of order and pattern to examine the way we shape our activities and those of others. She builds symmetries, pairs and patterns with a craftsman’s skill. Teasing out the inherent, albeit embellished, order in both the room and the quotidian talks of laying a table, she melds image and action in a taut decorative schema. Almost everything is doubled, mirrored, repeated and multiplied to kaleidoscopic effect. Two staff lay the table; dressed in identical uniforms with their heads bowed so we cannot see their faces; they are a pair, each other’s double, and doubled again by the mirroring. Each place setting is mirrored and thus paired with another across the table from it, and the distances between knives, forks, spoons, glasses and candlesticks, one to another, are all measured out exactly. Coutts’ careful framing, editing and manipulation of this image push the room’s ornate formality further, to a point where it hovers between comprehensible and unreal space. Vertical and horizontal symmetries exaggerate the already sharp perspective, while the black and white film stock heightens contrasts in the play of light and reflections off the polished wood, silver and glass, creating surface patterns that seamlessly echo in the repetitive actions and mesmerising rhythm of the workers’ unfolding task.

 

In this, the mirroring provides a visual trick – Coutts has created a table that lays itself. As one side is laid, so is the other – the staff’s labour, and the epic scale of the task, is halved. The mirroring device, beyond its compositional role and perceptual illusions, also introduces another symbolic level of play. The sliced and mirrored tabletop makes the shape of an upright equilateral triangle that dominated the composition. It thrusts steeply away from the bottom edge of the image into the distance at the top of the frame, creating a dynamic element and recognisable symbol with a spiritual and metaphysical weight.*

Mountain is presented as a small rear projection in the large double height space at Kettle’s Yard. A jewel-like image suspended in the dark space, its material substance (equipment, hanging structures) is invisible. Despite its title Mountain is much smaller than life-size, although the strong diagonal lines of the table and ceiling project out of the luminous image to command the surrounding space.

 

A soundtrack adds an additional layer to this piece, playing quietly alongside the image but as if coming from another room. Coutts has incorporated music in previous works such as epic (2000), and No Evil Star (2002), and for Mountain she worked with the composer Adrian Johnston. The soundtrack was recorded on two pianos, one in the UK and one in France. Both pianos are upright; one is a Steinway, which gives a noticeably richer sound; each is tuned differently, and the two seem to play alternately with and against each other. The sound is not continuous, but the spacing and timing reflect the worker’s rhythm. Slowly playing ascending and descending scales, to a sort of summit and back, the pianos count out the knives, forks and spoons, making deliberate but fruitless progress.

 

In Mountain as in all her work, the subject or content of Coutts’ interest is balanced by rigorous formal concerns. Holding these in tension, she establishes unexpected parallels between what we normally consider superficial or decorative, and a kind of existential enquiry. Her approach recalls the mathematicians whose abstract formulae translate to visual images in fractal and fibonacci number patterns that are also found in nature. For Coutts, the order revealed is social and behavioural.

 

* The upright equilateral triangle is a symbol that represents, in various contexts, spirit, divinity, fire, life, prosperity and harmony. In Christianity and Judaism the triangle is often used as a symbol for God and the Holy Trinity.

 

In her laconic sculpture and video installations, the British artist Marion Coutts mythologizes the mundane. With the insouciance and economy of a professional magician, she makes the one-dimensional multidimensional and transforms stale habit into compelling ritual.

This is evident in her works of the last few years. Fresh Air, 1998-2000, consists of three Ping-Pong tables shaped and marked with the asymmetrical layout of three London parks; the rules of the game were completely changed, inside became outside, private became public, and the mind wandered away. In Eclipse, 1998, a small garden greenhouse is periodically filled with artificial fog, which is then allowed to disperse. Meteorological white noise was thus imbued with an ominous rhythm and density: The conservatory was redolent of a gas chamber. Assembly, 2000, featured a blue-tinted film of aerobatic flocks of migrating starlings projected precisely from overhead Onto the top of a plain wooden lectern. This flickering mise-en-scene suggested a routine lecture, speech, or sermon in which the presenter suddenly ignores the script and lets instinct take over.

Coutts's most recent (and highest-profile) London exhibition was devoted to a single new work, Cult, 2002, in which she has wryly transfigured the domestic cat. The cavernous interior of the Chisenhale Gallery was dark except for a dim light emanating from nine video monitors mounted at head height on slender gray pedestals. Those at the corners of the cluster faced inward, while the others looked out in various directions. There was just enough space for a single person to squeeze between them. The screen of each monitor was only large enough to contain a life-size close-up image of the black face and white neck of a well-groomed cat against a black background. The footage plays on a forty-five-minute loop, made up of individual sequences of between three and seven minutes. The cat remains almost completely still, occasionally blinking its eyes.

Cult evokes prehistoric standing stone circles as well as hieratic Egyptian cat sculpture-in ancient Egypt, the cat goddess Bastet was the patroness of family happiness. Here, the emphasis is on distant admiration rather than domestic bliss. Cult underscores our separation from the animal world and the animal world's basic indifference. It keeps cuteness at arm s length and thwarts attempts to project affectionate feelings. The cat, multiplied nine times (no doubt in accordance with its proverbial "nine lives"), seems blissfully self-sufficient. It narcissistically basks in its own image, enclosed in its own charmed circle. Its egotism pricks the bubble of our own. I didn't even feel tempted to leave a saucer of milk.

 

 

Animal life is another thread in Coutts’ web. Cult is the latest in a series of video works where animals appear, part allegorical signifiers, behavioural specimens. In Break, three hamsters in exercise balls ricochet around a confined run. In No Evil Star a seething mass of mealworms dominate a miniature diorama. These are both straight projection pieces. Assembly is a symbiosis of video and found object. A wooden lectern stands before you, its tilted ‘rest’ making a screen for a continuous projection showing flocking starlings, as they swoop, dissipate and regroup in an open sky. The lectern is both literal and contextual support. The educational or ecclesiastical associations of the object rub off on the video imagery, so that overtones of mass control, determinism and institutionalised actions become intertwined with the natural spectacle. There is also a literary or polemic aura to the piece: the birds’ flight, with its change of direction, density and pace, could be transcribed into the narrative flow of a biblical tract, political speech or academic lesson.

 

This synesthetic transfer between media, disciplines or sensibilities is a fundamental procedure in Coutts’s work. Objects are pushed to their extremes, extending their identity into multi-layered agglomerations of reference, elaborations of the joke: when is a door not a door?

 

A scarred and battered vaulting horse is inscribed with the war memorial epitaph FOR THE FALLEN. It becomes simultaneously a cenotaph, a barrier, a support, a minimal, geometric solid, a personal memory jogger. Most of us have some memory of a vaulting horse: either that of dread, direct from school days, or secondary experience from film, most prominently its appearance as central alibi in the POW escape movie The Wooden Horse (1950). Coutts’ For The Fallen hyphenates war and sport and school, and recalls their respective casualties. A direct relative of Assembly, it carries connotations of institutional discipline and unconditional compliance with counter-intuitive commands. It is not generally in the individual’s interest to risk their neck jumping over large objects, but mostly we fall into line.

The opposition of individual and collective furnishes the study of history, sociology, ethics etc., with a vast area of discussion. Different political models, from liberal democracy to dictatorship, place different expectations on the individual within society, with varying levels of involvement or invisibility. In popular culture, too, stories of utopias, dystopias, failure, ambition, heroes and zombies focus on this relation of one to many. War movies, for instance, dramatise the individual’s visibility by elevating the hero to the camera’s lens above thousands of others who are shown as acting en masse – especially if they are the enemy.

 

In his essay The Genesis of the Individual (1992), the French philosopher of science Gilbert Simondon proposes a post-humanist model that does not tolerate an inner, objective essence, and in which the organic and inorganic are no longer distinguished from one another. The emphasis is placed on systems of actions, so that an individual or object is a ‘metastable equilibrium’, defined by its effect on and differences from the world, by the shape it makes and the shape the world makes around it. Simondon outlines a reciprocal, self-informing feedback loop that existence in a society implies. Coutts’ hybridising actions, her interstitial creations, illustrate this reflexivity and interdependency. The identity of each object lies neither in its appearance nor its function, but in its unfolding relationship with its fellow works, with our experience and expectations.

 

 

One thing you draw on specifically are the vignettes of Thomas Bewick. All the landscape images in Everglade are formatted as vignettes, floating in the middle of the screen. The vignette was a late 18th Century illustration device, pioneered by Bewick among others, and taken up by the French Romantics. Why did it interest you?

In 2002 I made a video piece called No Evil Star at the Hancock Museum in Newcastle. The Museum contains many of the stuffed birds that Bewick used as models for the series of woodcut bird illustrations, ‘Bewick’s Birds’, that helped to make his name.

 

Much of Bewick’s other work was landscapes and scenes of social life. Bewick didn’t do otherworldly subjects, his imagery was everyday. But the vignette format is intrinsically visionary. It creates a deliberately fragmentary view, often minute in scale. It doesn’t operate like the traditional window-on-the world with clearly defined edges. Its edges are indeterminate, dependent on the features of the scene - the trees, the far hills, the useful clump of rock framing the view. With Bewick’s landscapes there is no sense of continuation of image, no sense that the frame is provisional. The landscape would not continue to the right if you shifted slightly. I was drawn to the fact that the landscape was an object, like a blob, a pebble or a cloud. How it is shaped is defined by what is being depicted.

All the action in Everglade is contained within these islands of image. It’s a very unusual way to view film.

On a technical level I wasn’t interested in making a film version of Bewick’s images. The mark of a woodcut graphic and the pixellation of digital video are not comparable. But I wanted to make my filmed landscapes cohere and be believable as inhabited fictional spaces in the same way that Bewick’s are.

 

Used in book illustration the vignette lies in the middle of the page. The illumination within the image and the whiteness of the paper bleed into one another. In Everglade, the white light from the projector surrounding the image also forms the illumination within the scene. The screen operates like the single sheet of paper. You’re conscious of the image as something made, something formed, being projected onto the screen.

How does the vignetting impact on the meaning of the piece?

Each filmed sequence becomes like a pictured or imaginary scene. In my images – unlike many of Bewick’s - the sky is one of the main elements to go, and that has the biggest impact. There is no sky, all is land. What the sun does, we only see by reference to what happens on the ground. As the sun hides behind cloud, the scene plunges into darkness as if its power had been switched off. With the counterbalancing brightness of the whole sky gone, the projector does the work for the sun.

 

Isolated or framed as a vignette, the living world takes on the appearance of a model world, animated, making it seem sometimes entirely constructed. I like that ambiguity - and also the doubt as to whether the images are still or moving. In some scenes it can be hard to tell. So the provenance of the material is obscure. I think that’s important.

The work functions very precisely as a series of episodes. The scenes in the work are divided by interludes of white, they arise out of white and fade away within it.

The piece is designed to be seamless, suggesting that the activity is going on all the time. There are ten different scenes. The viewer can enter at any point. While working on it, the episodic aspect became more important within the structure - the rhythm of the suite of landscapes, the appearance of the figures, the duration of the white intervals between scenes. It all became more melancholic.

The intervals are long and are important for holding the pace. The fade to white is a filmic staple, often used to indicate cosmic or otherworldly experience, or a loss of consciousness. Fade to black is much more common. During these intervals the screen is just white light, emphasising the work of the projector as a component in the piece, not just a part of the equipment. I wanted to link the projected light and the visionary nature of the image.

Everglade couples sculpture and moving image. You’ve worked in this way before.

I like to expose the mechanics of the working of a piece, to make that part of the meaning - one reason why I don’t automatically go for straight projections. Assembly projects a video image onto the top of a lectern, which puts the viewer in a one-to-one, reading relationship to the image, allowing an intimacy with something very grand in scale.

 

Everglade was always intended as a sculptural piece. It is made up of a group of functional objects, a projector on a cross-legged stand, a projection screen on its tripod foot. Something about the provisionality of these structures made sense within the context of the piece. The relationship between this duo, screen and stand, was also important. The projector shoots at the screen, the screen bounces back the light. The visionary image is grounded in the prosaic, tethered to it like a balloon.

 

 

Who are the rule makers?

We've seen that in the animal kingdom there are simple, play-defining rules. All play requires rules, even if they are made up as you go along. (This would be the first rule: 'Rules will be made up as we go along'.)

If we return to our history of gaming, we saw that early games - both athletic and chance-based - began with simple rules. But increasingly a more strategic, cerebral gaming emerged. When was this? Well, the game historian Brian Sutton-Smith suggests that 'games of strategy seem to have emerged when societies increased in complexity to such an extent that there was a need for diplomacy and strategic warfare.' [3] All of which would suggest that these new games of forward planning and strategy - chess being the most widely-known example - were still teaching survival skills; it's just that you now needed more than a good throwing arm and the luck of the gods to thrive.

In our strictly codified modern societies, there are a million rules for social interaction. We learn them (some would say we're indoctrinated with them) from an early age. They suffuse our mentality to such an extent that we barely even notice they're there. This is precisely what Marion Coutts’ Royal Parks-shaped table tennis tables toy with. We may think we're playing, exploring the boundaries, but our activities are subtly proscribed by limits that we're about as aware of as a stick of rock is aware of the writing that runs through it.

Coutts' Ten Commandment-inscribed bowling pins, meanwhile, take the game into religious territory, showing that these ancient rules - which played a large part in defining our social codes - are seen as totally irrelevant within a secular society. A similar issue is raised by Effie Paleologou's images of eggs being blown for Easter.

 

Here the potential of a living thing is transformed into a static, decorative object, all as part of a Christian celebration of death and resurrection. This Christian festival has, in turn, usurped pagan rituals that marked the transformation of nature as winter turns to spring - which, ironically, is probably closer to the meaning that Easter now has for our predominantly secular culture.

[3] Quoted by Stephen Poole in Trigger Happy

© David Barrett