Mauricio Alejo: Between Still Image and Time

Mauricio Alejo
Between Still Image and Time-Image
Erandy Vergara*
After having worked with a photo series concerned with the movement of an object from one place to
another, Mexican photographer Mauricio Alejo began working with video. He then realized his images
needed time and some extra frames to accomplish the idea of action and movement. Since then on
video’s extended time of 30 frames per second has allowed Alejo to play with the viewers’ perception of
daily objects. e audience is confronted with still images slowly transforming with the passage of time
and with minimum interventions by the artist. e purpose of this paper is to analyze the differences
between photography and video and to explore the notions of duration and instant in relation to Alejo's.
Drawing from Henri Bergson’s thesis on the duration of time and Gilles Deleuze’s notion of
“time-image,” this paper explores how the illusion of duration created by the thirty frames of video
extends Alejo’s conceptual and formal possibilities. is paper argues that Alejo pushes the boundaries of
photography and video, serving to build
a conceptual link between them. For that I will rely on G. E Lessing’s discussion of the spatial properties
of painting and demonstrate that Alejo’s videos are not limited to what Lessing describes as the “single
moment of art,” but rather, that they unfold within many frames.
It is my thesis that the videos under discussion investigate two different “kinds” of temporality:
endlessness and eventfulness. ese notions will be discussed in relation to Bergson, Lessing and Michael
Fried, respectively. I argue that Alejo’s videos are still photographs embedded in time, and it is this
relationship between still image and moving image, between the instant of the photographic image and
the unfolding image of video that I discuss in the following pages.
*Erandy Vergara. “Mauricio Alejo: Between Still Image and Time-Image.”
Luna Córnea 33: Viajes al Centro de la Imagen (Mexico: Centro de la Imagen/CONACULTA, 2012).
Mauricio Alejo
Tower (2007)
2
Photography and the Single Moment
Mauricio Alejo1 began working with photography in the late 1990’s, basically constructing still
lives with ordinary objects. He devoted the first year of his career to the construction of fictions, placing
the objects at the core of his investigation, as he explains: “I thought I was photographing pure ideas, the
object as collective memory…. [en] I realized “that I was not talking about the idea, instead it was
about the specificities of the objects.”2 His work changed after 1999, specifically with the series Airports,
consisting of photographs taken from X-Ray filters installed on Mexico City’s airport. Unlike Alejo’s
previous formal images, this work moves towards a different approach in the production of images and
meaning, it was more about surveillance and control.
In 2000, Alejo moved to New York to pursue graduate studies at New York University. is
experience and his previous work Airport transformed his approach to photography, which is clearly
different in the trio Two Cubes, created in 2001. is work, as will be argued below, is crucial to this
analysis as it represents Alejo’s move towards time-based arts. As he puts it: “I had never done any work
embedded in time, it was always the suspended time, the frozen instant. And yet at the same time, it
seemed to me a very interesting aspect of photography, because it required the creation of a past and a
future. However, the passage of time was something I had not considered in my work before. When I
made this piece I started thinking about time and then I began working with video.”3
e point of departure of this essay is the still image and more specifically photography. For that,
I will draw from Lessing’s canonical text Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766),
and Fried’s Art and Objecthood (1967). Although these approaches address different periods in art history,
both Lessing and Fried defend what in their view is the material limitation of spatial arts, that is the
“single moment.” For Lessing, painting and sculpture must restrict to the single moment while arts such
as poetry and literature must confine to the succession of time.4 Similarly, Fried is opposed to the
exploration of time in the visual arts. For him, the work of art can be meaningful in a single moment and
hence, it must surrender to it.5 Neither Fried nor Lessing talk about photography, but they do write
about a key element of photography: time.
Indeed, photography functions with time, not only the mechanism and process of time exposure;
regarding the kind of temporality it depicts, photography’s time is the instant. Certainly, the elements of
a photograph are frozen in time. Although they can suggest movement and action, what we see in a
1
Born in Mexico City in 1969, Mauricio Alejo received his BA in Communications at the Universidad Intercontinental in
Mexico City in 1987, and a MFA at New York University in 2002. He lives and works between Mexico City and New York.
2
Gabriella Gomez-Mont. “Mauricio Alejo: Las Cosas y el Ojo Desnudo,” Fahrenheit (Dec. 2002) 25.
3
Alejo quoted in Fernando Llanos, "El Equilibrio Entre la Inocencia y el Conocimiento: Entrevista a Mauricio Alejo,” Replica
21 (March 2003) 19.
4
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon; an Essay Upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Trans. Ellen Frothingham. New
York: Noonday Press, 1957) 91.
5
Fried focuses specifically on literalist art; his main thesis is that these kinds of art practices are theatrical, therefore they are
antithetical to art. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum (June 1967, reprinted in Minimal Art: a Critical
Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, New Work: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1968).
3
photograph is just one “shot,” an instant represented in space.6 As art historian Alberto Ruy Sánchez
wrote, “[n]o one can possibly doubt that time is a fundamental element of photography. It is one of the
materials from which photography is made. e photographic apparatus itself is a machine for measuring
time: among its other functions, it calculates and controls the entrance, the movement, of a ray of light
—it is the river which transforms the flow of life into the image of an instant.”7 Photography freezes
bodies and actions, and even when bodies move there is the possibility of opening the diaphragm and
accelerating the speed in order to freeze the passage of time. Obviously this does not mean that time
stops, but only that the action is frozen within the film. For example, one of Alejo’s photographs entitled
Tower (2007) portrays a dish filled with soap bubbles. We ignore how the bubbles were made as we do
not see anyone playing with them or building the “tower,” and we certainly do not see the bubbles
breaking as time passes; what we see is the instant that the camera captured. Another example is Todream
(2004), which consists of a pile of pillows arranged in the middle of an empty room. e pillows forming
a tower that goes from top to bottom are frozen in time, that is what we will always see in this image, not
another time within its construction, but this very instant.
Mauricio Alejo
Todream (2004)
6
Here it is important to clarify that, for example, in the early years of the daguerreotype, the process took several minutes and
required subjects to remain still. erefore, what seems to be an instant was in fact the result of a long process. In fact, some of
the first images of Daguerre did not show living beings because of the long exposure times. Beaumont Newhall, La Historia de
la Fotografia (Barcelona: G Gilli, 1978).
7
Alberto Ruy Sánchez, “Nina Subin: Time Within Time,” Luna Córnea 19 (Jan.-April 2000) 96.
4
e time that Lessing and Fried discuss is this instant that will remain frozen in the photograph,
the problem is that they consider it its limit, they see it as the only possibility of spatial arts, therefore
their time it is not any instant, but “the” most important one, “the” single moment. Accordingly, Lessing
elaborates on the selection of the “right” moment, and Fried on how the action and meaning must be
reduced within the work. Again, photography captures instants, but the “single moment” is just one way
to explore static images. Another way is Alejo’s series of photographs and videos, which complicate the
single moment thesis.8 As film theorist Peter Wollen points out: “Film and video art, however, exhibit
only a small fraction of the possible ways in which time can be used and understood. Time, which we
tend to think about in purely linear terms, is in fact incredibly complex.9
For example, Alejo’s research on time and photography is pushed forward in Hot Water (2004), a
series of progressive steaming up of the artist's bathroom. e position of the camera is fixed in a
bathroom with beige walls and white ceramic in the shower. On the front wall there is a small mirror and
we can also see the cabinets on the left side of the image. In the first photograph the shower is open and
the action of falling water is frozen in time, we see its shadow on the ceramic; the mirror reflecting the
beige walls. e second photograph was probably taken a few seconds after, but here the space has
changed: the drops of water and their shadow are diffused and the mirror is not reflecting the walls
anymore, instead it is turning white and a kind of light irradiates from it. In short, the image seems
blurry. On the third photograph, the mirror has almost fused with the background, is only then that we
distinguish that the previous image is not blurry. As we associate the effect with the space, we realize it is
the vapor transforming the space, hence the image. e last photograph is completely diffuse: we can
only recognize a few elements, the edges of the cabinets and the edges of mirror.
Each of these photographs depicts an instant, but together they explore the passage of time in
that specific space. In other words, although each image has its own characteristics, as a whole they
encompass duration. According to Dolev, the passage of time is “the becoming present of future events
and then their becoming past.”10 is succession of events is explored in Alejo’s Hot Water, the images
being transformed by water as it becomes vapor. What we see is an expansion of the instant that works
through the series of multiple instants, not a “single moment” but an extended instant, a moment
unfolding in time, yet limited to these four images. Of course this is just metaphorical, as we cannot
measure or divide time (Bergson). Time is absolute duration, but what we do measure is time in its
spatial terms. at is what happens in these images, Alejo’s work is engaged in a succession of instants
represented in space.
Duration, for Bergson, is real time, perceived and lived, and that is a condition as there is no time
without consciousness. Duration is essentially a continuation of what no longer exists into what does
exist, but it is not “constituted” by instants; we think of instants because we are used to think time in
spatial terms.11 In fact, for him, instantaneity involves two things: continuity in real time and spatialized
time. Spatialized time is described by a motion that has become symbolic of time, so what we perceive is
8
Minimalist art is a perfect example of the posibilities of painting. See Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood.”
9
Peter Wollen, Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (London; New York: Verso, 2002) 238.
10
Yuval Dolev, Time and Realism: Metaphysical and Antimetaphysical Perspectives,
viii.
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 2007)
11
Drawing from Einstein’s theory of relativity Bergson argues that there are two kinds of time, the time of the philosophers
(real time, pure duration) and the time of the physicist (which is measurable as it is perceived in space). See Henri Bergson,
Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe, (Ed. Robin Durie; trans. of supplementary material Mark
Lewis and Robin Durie, Manchester, England: Clinamen Press, 1999), specially chapter two and three.
5
that time passes, and yet, as Bergson assesses, “it is we who are passing… it is the motion before our eyes
which, moment by moment, actualizes a complete history given virtually.”12
In Alejo’s images, the spatial transformations suggest the passage of time, the idea of motion and
change within the image gives rise to our perception of duration. Bergson remarks that through space we
can measure every interval of time and his elaboration is pertinent here because the spatial allows the
passage of time in photography. Furthermore, in the specific case of Alejo’s work, through instants he
suggests duration.
Mauricio Alejo
Hot Water(2004)
12
Ibid, 43.
6
Two Cubes (2001) is a key example, because it represents Alejo’s move from photography to video.
e work consists of a series of photographs documenting the movement of a transparent acrylic box on
a mound of snow. Here again, duration is suggested through instants, through the movement of the cube
on the snow, and it is this exploration of the image in time that lead to Alejo’s decision to work with
video. As he has stated, he “needed time,” and that's why this ideas deserves investigation.
e question of time in photography is less about the fact that the medium is limited by itself
(Lessing), than it is about another kind of exploration beyond the instant. Rather, Alejo explores a
different relation with objects and space, another kind of perception of images in which time is “not the
abstraction that occurs when we project space into time”—Bergson’s time of the physicist—but pure time,
lived time with no resemblance to numbers or to instants.
Alejo’s move from photography to video is representative of his philosophical repositioning with
the media and his artistic practices; it has to do with his preoccupation to expand the still image. is
does not mean that he stopped working with photography, it just means that some of his projects did not
“fit” within its space. And even then, Alejo’s work oscillates conceptually and visually between
photography and video, for he does not rely so much on movement but on time, hence the boundaries of
these media fade.
At this point, it is important to mention that Alejo’s early videos are reminiscent of the first
experiments with film of the Lumiere’s brothers, Geroge Mélies and in fact, various seminal films and
videos As Peter Wollen has noted, “Many artists' videos, it seems, are atavistic works, deliberately
returning to the single-shot technique which ruled at the very dawn of cinema, setting up a continuous
action and then filming it within a given time-limit without any edits or even camera movements.13 is
kind of work is representative of numerous artists from the sixties and seventies such as Vito Acconci,
Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, William Wegman. And certainly this has also been the
beginning for Alejo. What is important to note is that his background as a photographer highly
influenced his exploration with video; as he explains, his early videos are “photographs with time.”14
A clear example is Line (2002), a fifty-second video of a white screen divided by a line. Certainly,
neither the image nor the audio provide directions to see it other ways, what we see is only what the title
suggests. Furthermore, it seems that we are looking at a photograph since there are not evident
transformations and the light does not seem to reflect movement. It is a photograph until Alejo’s
intervention―his hand emerges from the right and literally interrupts the line―at which point the
fragility of perception becomes clear: the line is in fact the steady stream of water. It is then that we make
associations and realize that the sound, indeed, corresponds to falling water, but it is so subtle that,
paradoxically, we need to know what we are seeing to realize what we are hearing. In addition, the video
is so short that we need to see it more than once to grasp the whole and to understand what just
“happened.” Especially when encountering Alejo’s videos for the first time we cannot know there is an
element of surprise accompanying some of these early works.
is discussion leads us to the issue of Lessing’ single moment, which is in fact very restrictive, as
for him each medium is clearly defined in scope and characteristics. Painting and photography, as spatial
arts, are supposed to be limited to the representation of the single moment. But Alejo seems to struggle
with this form of temporality, he complicates the single moment and pushes further. In fact, Alejo’s work
in video extends the “pregnant moment” as the thirty frames per second unfold. is applies to Crack
(2002-2004), which is only thirty-two seconds of a static image unfolding in time. e object here is a
13
Peter Wollen, Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (London; New York: Verso, 2002) 234.
14
Alejo, Personal Interview, 10 Nov. 2008.
7
white plate apparently cracked, or at least that is what we see at first glance. On a closer look however, the
plate is filled with milk and by the time we realized it we hear someone blowing on it to reveal that the
“crack” is formed by hair floating on the milk. Again, the elements of the video are minimal, so is the
sound and the artist intervention, and yet what seems to be a still image is in fact another statement on
perception unfolding in time, another extended still image. According to Alejo “this video is about
fragility and alludes to two kind of ruptures, that of representation and that of perception.” I argue that
these ruptures happen through the passage of time. Following Bergson, the suggestion is that the rupture
can be experienced by the observer, in as much as her/his consciousness provides duration to time.15
Furthermore, in both Line and Crack, the process of perception is complicated by the artist, who
forces the viewer to think of the image differently and to approach it with more attention in order to
experience the expanding instant. Alejo also raises a key question: is it photography or is it video? He
works with this question and explores how the instants and durations are negotiated in video.
Beyond these forms of temporality there is an interesting tension between Alejo’s works and
cinema. Deleuze’s elaboration provides insight. For him the single image in film is an immobileinstantaneous section of movement reflecting actions through innumerable instants. In other words,
cinema “is the system which reproduces movement as a function of any-instant-whatever that is, as a
function of equidistant instants, selected so as to create the impression of continuity.”16 According to
Deleuze, the frame in cinema is “any-instant-whatever,” and as such there is a fundamental difference
between painting and the individual frame in film, as the later “is not the illusionist synthesis of a
narrative context, but a single… incidental moment (any-instant-whatever) in an overall narrative
structure.”17 Concerning Alejo’s video, the any-instant-whatever is put into question. e works in video
that have been previously discussed are, especially at the beginning, any-instant-whatever and yet at the
same time that instant unfolds, it becomes important by itself, is like a photograph extending the single
moment -which is not a single moment anymore. Line, for instance, is a photograph until the hand of
the artist disrupts the image allowing us to recognize that time was unfolding before we noticed it. To be
clear, however, that does not mean that because there was not consciousness there was not time―in
Bergsonian terms―in fact it is at the very instant of the artist’s intervention that we acknowledge that
duration was unfolding before our eyes.
Another still image embedded in time is Twig (2002), a tiny branch and its shadow standing in
the middle of a bright bed of snow. e still life is suspended in time as the twig rests in what seems a
winter morning in a park. e camera is positioned close to the branch and so we do not know exactly
what space is being depicted, but in the distance we hear voices of kids playing as well as the sound of
steps approaching the camera and then going away, so the sound suggests action, and yet the branch is
frozen in time. Suddenly, the wind blows, taking away the calm of the scene and the twig’ shadow, which,
in fact, is not a shadow but a thin slice of wood identical to the branch. Here, thirty-five seconds are
enough to suspend the observer’s attention in an instant that unexpectedly moves from still to moving
image.
15
Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, Chapter 2.
16
Deleuze quoted in Susanne Gaensheimer, “Moments in Time,” Moments in Time: On Narration and Slowness (Markham,
Ont.: James Lumbers Pub) 41.
17
Ibid.
8
Mauricio Alejo
Line (2002), screen shot.
9
Mauricio Alejo
Crack (2002-2004), screen shot.
10
For the artist, Line and Twig are about illusive facts that engage viewers to experience reality in a
different way because they break the charm of illusion. e minimal elements and contrast of color
capture the viewer’s attention, so in a way these works are what Deleuze calls “time-image.” In Twig,
“everything that changes is in time, but time does not in itself change, it could itself change only in
another time, indefinitely. At the point where the cinematographic image most directly confronts the
photo, it also becomes most radically different from it.”18 Alejo’s twig endures, it “represent[s] the
unchanging form of that which moves, so long as it is at rest, motionless…”19 Deleuze’s time-image
incites the viewer to think of the image and to engage in a different process of perception. In Alejo’s work
this is possible through the spatial representation of time. For him video and photo are the means of
sharing his observation of daily spaces, a way to say “maybe there is another space within the same
space.”20
At this point is crucial to call attention to the title of the works, a very important element of
Alejo’ videos. In fact, he uses the titles as a strategy of distraction, the verbal element preceding the image
functions as the linguistic message, in which Roland Barthes distinguishes two functions: anchorage and
relay, the former helping the viewer to “understand” the meaning and the later complementing the
image. Alejo’s videos combine both anchorage and relay, directing the audience to focus its attention on
the wrong place at the right time. And yet, once the image unfolds, the visual structure breaks the
linguistic.21
From within this context of the instant and its extension in video, the following section focuses
on another kind of temporality that Mauricio Alejo has explored, that of endlessness.
Video, Loop and the Rhetoric of Endlessness
Mauricio Alejo has produced other videos that formally deal with Bergson’s definition of pure
duration. is is particularly evident in the videos entitled Endless Sphere (2007) and Memory (2002).
Endless Sphere is a video in loop that depicts a coin spinning on its edge, and, as the title suggests, the
action takes place endlessly. is temporality is consistent with Bergson’s notion of duration, in as much
as pure duration consists in the passage of time from one moment to another; time is succession and it is
not conceived without a before and after. However, it must be remembered that this unfolding does not
refer to a clear present and past, but rather to an endless flow of duration.22 Endless Sphere is that, a
continuous flow that lasts as long as there is consciousness. In addition, this video is endlessness in
meaning. A spinning coin alludes to luck, and yet at the same time is paradoxical because the coin never
falls, so luck is never decided, but instead, is suspended in time. Furthermore, the spherical form draws
attention to infinity, in both the action (time) and the form (space).
In light of this work, the suggestion of endlessness is very interesting if related to Fried's critique
of literalist art. As it has been previously mentioned, Fried is against duration in the visual arts and he
18
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2 (London: Athlone, 1986-1989) 17.
19
Ibid.
20
Alejo quoted in Fernando Llanos, "El Equilibrio Entre la Inocencia y el Conocimiento: Entrevista a Mauricio Alejo,”
Replica 21 (March 2003) 19.
21
Barthes’ elaboration will be further discussed regarding the video Fact and Fiction.
22
Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, Chapter 2.
11
critiques the idea that the work of art and the experience exists and persists in time. Moreover, this
articulation is crucial because Alejo’s work has been described as minimalist. e most obvious
connections are forms, shapes and other spatial elements; basically the number of elements is extremely
reduced and the backgrounds are mundane spaces but always empty and clean. For example, Milk (2002)
a white sink fill with milk; Empty (2006), a series of translucent empty plastic bags of different colors
placed one inside the other. In addition, the artist’s interest with objects projects objecthood. However,
the most important connections between literalist art and some of Alejo’s videos are in terms of space and
time.
Mauricio Alejo
Endless Sphere (2007), screen shot.
12
According to Fried, literalist art is open to multiple interpretations and the meaning is
inexhaustible, endless. at is, “able to go on and on, even having to go on and on…”23 In addition,
there is the passage of time, as the experience persists in time its duration is infinite. For Fried, literalist
work deals with the duration of the experience, which persists in time, in short, “at every moment the
work itself is wholly manifest.”24 Fried critiques this idea and argues that the work of art can be meaningful
in a single moment. Alejo’s exploration with time is embedded it these forms of temporality, between the
single moment and endlessness. His videos unfold in time, whether endlessly (in loop) or in a few
seconds. In terms of space and meaning, literalist art does not respect the boundaries between the work of
art and the outside world. is is obvious in Alejo’s videos; by depicting daily objects staged in ordinary
stages and by directly intervening in the image, the viewer is taken outside the work of art and is brought
back to the ordinary world.
e possibility of time and duration in art, that is, the wholly manifestation of art that Freid is so
afraid of, is the core of Alejo’s videos Endless Sphere and Memory. ese works play with this form of
temporality and they are endlessness in meaning and action. What does a coin spinning in perpetuity, for
as long as you watch, mean? Alejo’s work is full of interpretation, it goes on and on and back again and
the single moment is not a still image but a moving image, a digital signal that extends and unfolds in
light and time. Memory consists of a crumpled ball of paper on a white background. e image is
therefore neutral, extremely clean and subtle as the ball of paper slowly unravels. “We imagine what
comes next: the paper will regain its original form, retrieve its composure, reassert its purity, the camera
will be put on rewind and the sequence of events that lead to the balling-up reversed. But instead the
image fades out after approximately five seconds and it is replaced by another shot of a tightly crumpled
sheet, which begins to unravel only to be cut and replaced yet again. is occurs 43 times…”25 In a
gallery space, this video is presented in loop so the unfolding of the piece of paper is infinite and the
sound increases the feeling of abstraction and suspension. e duration of the “event” per se is not even a
minute, but the duration of the experience is endless. As Bergson wrote, “it is impossible to distinguish
between the duration, however short it may be, that separates two instants and a memory that connects
them, because duration is essentially a continuation of what no longer exists into what does exist.26 is
tension is at play in Memory.
On the other hand, Short Term Memory’s temporality is a clear representation of time in space,
but is not endless, at least not obviously. Here, the camera is fixed on a roll of toilet paper with a black
dot of ink in the middle; as the artist pulls it, the paper unfolds and the black spot becomes smaller and
smaller until it disappears. is work is extremely poetic and it functions as a metaphor of what Bergson
describes as the inner duration that accompanies us “from the first to the last moment of our conscious
life.”27 e time is literally unfolding and yet the temporality is not clear; is it pure duration? Is it an
instant, or is it the way our memories vanish with the passage of time? Further, is it really short term
memory or is it nostalgia? According to the artist it is an emotional and sentimental choreography and if
we consider his previous work, the idea of choreography functions in the level of movement, an aspect
that was not completely explored in most of his early videos from 2002-2004.
23
Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum, 166.
24
Emphasis of the author. Ibid, 167.
25
Christopher Ho, “Doubting Saint omas,” Modern Painters (February 2005).
26
Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, 33.
27
Ibid, 34.
On the other hand, the reference to memory escapes Bergson’s two forms of memory, pure
memory and habit-memory as the ink fades and there is no way to restore it. In fact, the image may be
restored but not the ink; it has vanished. If, as Bergson wrote, memory is the intersection of mind and
matter, then this work restores the perception of images to the real. Unlike Memory, Short Term Memory
alludes to life and its inevitable decay, to the certainty that everything in life is hopelessly bound to
collapse. However, [Alejo] manages to find beauty in the fact that within even the most annihilating
inertia, there is a moment when all things make sense. ere is a moment when everything appears to be
not only tied together, but also fulfilled and removed from the mechanism of deterioration. It is from
these very moments that Alejo attains a precious feeling of wholeness; a feeling that eventually wears out
and becomes the very essence of nostalgia.28
Mauricio Alejo
Memory (2002), screen shot.
28
Galeria Ramis Barquet, “Mauricio Alejo: Crossing a Flimsy Bridge,” press release (March, 2006).
14
Mauricio Alejo
Short Term Memory (2006), screen shot.
15
Mauricio Alejo
Fact and Fiction (2002-2004), screen shot.
Also key is Fact and Fiction (2007), a video showing the front cover of a book entitled Fatti e
Finzioni. e title and the work allude to the presence-absence of the artists and to the idea of fiction and
construction in video. e same can be said about the image, because we see the book and the artist’s
moist hand imprinted on the matte paper, but the video is edited in a way that we are not allowed to see
his hand. Moreover, the video is presented in loop so the action is unfolding in time; past present and
future fading in circles. At stake here is the artist’s strategy to recreate and to record motion, because the
only thing remaining is the trace that his body left on the object, the moisture draws and erases the
silhouette and we can almost see his bones on the book creating the sense of movement and at the same
time acting as the only testimony of Alejo’s presence. It is for this reason that Fact and Fiction reveals
another kind of approach to the media: the camera is fixed and of course the book is static, it is the
moisture as it abandons the book that gives us the illusion of movement, but in fact, it is through time
that the silhouette fades in and out endlessly.
16
In a way, Fact and Fiction is consistent with Deleuze’s “crystal-image” for its main element is time,
as he describes: “since the past is constituted not after, the present that it was but at the same time, time
has to split itself in two at each moment as present and past, which differ from each other in nature, or,
what amounts to the same thing, it has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one which is
launched towards the future while the other falls into the past.”29 At the same time, there is a
preoccupation with the recording of events and its fictitious reconstruction, an invitation to the audience
to think about the image; this bring us to another elucidation of Deleuze since the construction of reality
and fiction has to do with time itself. e kind of films (and video) that Deleuze calls the series of time
“brings together the before and after in a becoming, instead of separating them; its paradox is to
introduce an enduring interval in the moment itself.”30 As the title suggests this video is in between fact
and fiction, and so conceptually it is also suspended in a loop, showing us that the ideal of Truth “was the
most profound fiction.31
On the one hand this relationship between fiction and video (of course inherited from
photography) will now be briefly discussed in terms of Barthes. For him, the linguistic image is denoted
and the symbolic image is connoted, and although this distinction is merely operational as there is not “a
literal image in pure state” (42), photography’s supposedly exact recording of reality "naturalizes the
symbolic message, [and] it innocents the semantic artifice of connotation."32 is is something that Alejo
uses to confront the viewer with an image that is not what it looks like. As he comments, “critically, I am
only interested in contributing to the skepticism of the image, that is, the photographic image and the
image of video are discourses, they are not reality and they are not absolute truth. e media is a great
fiction disguised of truth.”33
Similarly, Gravity (2002-2004) plays with the idea of fiction and viewers’ perception. e video
starts when a white balloon is thrown in the air and then it slowly deflates, becoming smaller until it is
completely empty, but, when it is expected to fall, the balloon instead goes upward, and then the sound
of it falling to the floor is heard. at is what we can see, the empty balloon is not going downwards but
it rather drifts to the top of the screen. Gravity contains an element of surprise, but it does not seem to be
possible, let alone real; gravity is absolute, isn’t it? Once again at stake is perception and visual illusions
that seem to be staged in the theater of the obvious and yet pose the ability to surprise and make viewers
see that what they see is not reality but a spatial construction. Technically, it may not be hard to rotate
the video 180 degrees to subvert the image, but the surprise forces the viewers to shift the process of
perception in a very short time, taking them out of the habit-memory.34 Hence, they experience surprise,
disappointment or disillusion because certainly that is not what they expected. In that sense, this work
alludes to Deleuze’s thought-image, in which “thinking becomes an element of the image. It must no
29
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, 81.
30
Ibid, 155.
31
Ibid, 149.
32
Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) 45.
33
Alejo quoted in Fernando Llanos, "El Equilibrio Entre la Inocencia y el Conocimiento: Entrevista a Mauricio Alejo,”
Replica 21 (March 2003) 19.
34
Henri Bergson, “Of the Recognition of Images,” Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer
(New York: Zone Books, 1990) 77-132.
17
longer be understood as an object exterior to the image that the latter is supposed to represent.”35
e question of audience is key to Alejo’s work because it requires the viewer to enter his game of
perception. According to Alejo, “what interests me about video is that it invites an intelligent audience, I
mean you don’t want to lie, you want that they take part in the lie with you, that in the moment of the
trick there is not greater surprise than believing that reality can be another way or many different ways.”36
Here it is pertinent to think of Gravity and probably most of Alejo’s videos in terms of Bergons’
perception, which is the intersection of attention and memory. For him, past images are always preserved,
but they are stored in two different places, pure memories are stored within consciousness while habitual
memories are stored in the brain. e former images while the later repeats. ey both live on forever but
the habit memory is practical in our daily life, thus it is the most recurring. erefore, if perception is
always affected by memory, what we see on Alejo’s images is not only what we see but what we remember.
e most important aspect of his work regarding perception, I argue, is that it challenges the habit
memory, thus disrupting our perception of daily objects and spaces.
Although each image will appeal to different memories and its impact will depend on each
observer, because the images are staged in mundane spaces there is no need for a specific audience, hence
recognition does not rely on exclusivity: there can be connections and even identification. at is what
make Alejo’s work strong: few elements in mundane spaces and concise actions in short time: simple to
store in the brain. For example in Line, the only elements are the line and the artist’ hand, thus they get
straight to the point and straight to the brain; powerful enough to persist in time and in our memory.
35
Heme de Alcote quoted in Barbara Filser, “Gilles Deleuze and a Future Cinema,” Future Cinema: e Cinematic Imaginary
After Film, ed. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel. (ZKM/Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe; Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2003) 215.
36
Alejo quoted in Fernando Llanos, "El Equilibrio Entre la Inocencia y el Conocimiento, 19.
18
Mauricio Alejo
Gravity (2002-2004), screen shot.
19
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