Video, Modernity and Modernism

Abstract

A woman picks an apple. She picks it again. She puts it back on its branch, then there are two of her, mirrored across the video screen. Each picks and replaces apples, out of phase. The colour bleaches out of the image, from rich greens to harsh, grainy black and white, until the image becomes a kind of Rorschach blob, an illegible, symmetrical tangle in which we read off our desires. A woman like this woman but not her, another, similar woman, beckons from a gate, and fades away, reappearing further down a lane, beckoning. In modified form, these images will recirculate through the 18 minutes of Catherine Elwes’s Autumn (1991), part of an ongoing project on the seasons. The only thing that is obvious is that this is not television. It is not transparent; you cannot read straight through it to a lived reality because something intervenes between you and the woman in the orchard, something that you wouldn’t notice on TV.