Memo from the Future: The Trans-Temporal Work of Kirk Tougas

A frame from Kirk Tougas' The Framing of Perception (1973). The monolith-like altar of ultra-consumption ironically reveals that we ourselves are the ones actually being consumed by a seemingly benevolent Moloch.  Image: Tougas.

This article first appeared in the Spanish film magazine Found Footage, March 2020.

“The assertion for an art released from images, not simply from old representation but from the new tension between naked presence and the writing of history on things; released at the same time from the tension between the operations of art and social forms of resemblance and recognition. An art entirely separate from the social commerce of imagery.”  – Jacques Ranciere, The Future of the Image (2003).

“When is appropriation appropriate?” – Kirk Tougas, 2019.

Every film is a tattoo etched on the surface of time, some more so than others. Certain filmmakers, however, eschew entirely the tradition of distracting the audience from awareness of the fact that they are watching and are customarily invited to submit to a wilful disappearance into a real or life-like story. These consummate others instead tend to invite the audience to relish and savour the viewing experience as a sequence of electric paintings, which may or may not contain a program beyond the temporary tattoo incised onto the dream space they occupy while in a theatre. Some of them, such as Kirk Tougas, go even further: they implore the viewer to actively engage in watching their own watching.

The Assassination of Art Nuko by the Curator John O’Brian

Cruising down the Rideau in Ottawa by Carl Chaplin.

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Kirk Tougas, to our group.

Obviously an exaggeration, but a Vancouver artist has been "disappeared" by guest curator John O’Brian in BOMBHEAD at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Rephrased, perhaps an alternate title could be Shadowboxing with History: How Curators Can Erase Artists, but between erasure and assassination, let’s settle on the latter.

Frozen Music: The Celluloid Dreams of Richard Kerr

All images courtesy of the artist.

“Now, why should the cinema follow the forms of theatre and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts and ideas to arise from the combination of two separate concrete objects?” – Sergei Eisenstein

The elegant artifacts crafted in this time-tapestry originate in a mythical country I like to call Analogos. This land is the opposite of the digital world we currently occupy and harkens back to an era when the image ruled its optical kingdom in a nearly sacred dance of montage assembly and patterned sequence. This limited-edition artist’s book, as a kind of guidebook for tourists traveling in time, captures moments from a celluloid dream world that is anti-Hollywood and pro-haptic: it privileges a domain where physical touch was much more important than cerebral reflection. And yet much of its basic content also references the very dream factory that it also seeks to escape from, plunging us fully forward into the realm of experimental cinema and celebrating cinema itself as a kind of music for the eyes.

Kirk Tougas, the founder of Cinematheque in Vancouver, which traces its own origins way back to the land of Analogos in the early pre-digital 1970’s, has often cautioned me about using the word experimental to describe films which provide alternatives to linear entertainment and take us on a fabulous flight to the outer edges of visual art. Experiential, he has helped me realize, is often a more accurate term to characterize those filmmakers, such as the Canadian Richard Kerr, who wants us to experience and explore his works as paintings that move, or don’t move at all. Hence, perhaps, Kerr’s primary notion of a project which utilizes a haunting inventory of images solely as the raw material, the paint of light and time, so to speak, in a weaving motif which arrives at a core moment of inherent stillness: when time stops and looking starts.

Fabula: Transgression and Transformation in the Work of Müller and Giradet

Contre-Jour (Backlight) 2009/Festival of Gijon, 2010.

Note: A shorter version of this article appeared in Arcade Project Magazine on May 25, 2020.

“Images, our great and primitive passion . . .” – Walter Benjamin, ca. 1935.

“Your camera is the best critic there is. Critics never see as much as the camera does. The camera is more perceptive than the human eye.”  – Douglas Sirk, 1955.

The two members of this creative pair of collaborating film artists are also visual archaeologists, conducting a rich excavation at the site of cinematic mythology. Sometimes a meaning is lost in translation, other times its essence is found in translation. In the case of the contemplative film experiments of Matthias Müller and Christoph Giradet, the immediately familiar territory of conventional storytelling, the art of fabula, and those cinematic stereotypes most often utilized in order to register meaning and emotion, have been translated from pure entertainment into pure reverie. None of the unconscious content embedded in their sources, however, has been left behind. On the contrary, as they explore the virtual edges of our visual domain in their compelling and challenging works, we are thrust into a jarring juxtaposition of painting, photography, storytelling and dreaming with our eyes wide open.