Bodily Traces

Abstract

My paper examines scratching in terms of performativity. Scratching, as practiced by Len Lye, Stan Brakhage, Su Friedrich and many contemporary experimental animators, is a camera-less animation device where only a pointed object intervenes between the filmmaker and the celluloid. As described by Wystan Curnow, scratching brings “the body to bear in new ways“ (Curnow 2000: 208). Scratching is dependent on certain intensities for even the merest alteration of the pressure of the fingers, the tension of the hand, and the use of the scratching tool can alter the cinematic result. Scratching allows for the preservation of the artist's relationship to her/his material, much like the closeness and intimacy that exists between a painter and a canvas. Fabricating a film by hand is very nearly the opposite of “standard” filmmaking practice, which depends on an elaborate series of optical, chemical and mechanical processes, all of which further serve to distance the product from the instance of production. Handmade films, on the contrary, are intimately connected to presence, corporeality and performativity. To take a broader account of scratching – an autographic art practice– a renewed and dynamic concept of materiality, which avoids substantialism as well as servitude to the semantic, has to be tied together with J. L. Austin’s notion of the performative. What counts is the actual gesture that executes the very act of inscription. With regard to its dispositif, the scratched mark can be regarded as an indexical trace, which results from an action upon a material substrate. Many contemporary art practices, for example, Conceptual Art, eliminate the trace and deny the gesture, which are frequently regarded as a benchmark of modernist art. This paper argues that by revalorizing the gestural, autographic techniques such as scratching are far from reviving pre-modernist models of authorship, but can be regarded – via their performative aspects – to be at the heart of modernist art practice.

Titel der Veranstaltung

Performing Animation, Animating Performance

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