Print archive: On Openings, Daniel Strang’s filmic event

14 Jun

First published in The Art Paper Issue 02 — buy it here.

Daniel Strang, *Openings* (still), 2022, 1080P HD video, colour & black and white, stereo, 4 hours. Courtesy of the artist

Daniel Strang’s digital video Openings is both an ambitious feat and a straightforward exercise. A 240-minute montage of acquired footage perfectly spanning the four-hour window that RM Gallery is open, Strang’s video is structured around a narrow schema: near-exhaustive documentation of every scene that depicts art exhibition openings from the history of cinema (1945 to 2020), arranged chronologically by the year of each film’s release. Despite the simple premise, its breadth is massive, and functions not just as an artwork but a weirdly comprehensive cultural and sociological document.

Where to begin with such a formidable text? The most obvious reading: it’s all about art. Openings functions as a turbo, time-lapse anthropological survey of the art which prompts such occasions, and the art world that populates them. Openings is as fun as an edu-tainment supercut: behold as figurative landscapes and portraits morph into abstract expressionism, develop toward whirling kinetic sculptures that become chrome framed photographs of long-legged women in stilettos. And until the late 2000s, when everyone suddenly becomes incredibly jaded, the punters just won’t stop being shocked or outraged. Those who are in-the-know at these events, the gallerists, artists, critics, and collectors, are usually gently ridiculed while representing the fore- front of sartorial trends. The art world is a natural home of the fashion-forward, and as a catalogue of artistic trends as well as fashion across the eras, Openings is a joy.

At its essence, Openings is one enormous montage; but where montaged video artworks often utilise film as a raw material in service to some other idea, it is clear that Strang remains enthralled to the original medium. Another super montage, Christian Marclay’s The Clock, comes to mind in the way that it collates film together to deliver a single high-concept: film-as-function- ing-timepiece. However, Strang’s work is unusual as it employs film as both its material and subject. Strang is not only an artist but a cinematographer and editor by profession; and in its careful, conscious handling of the source material, Openings could only have been made by someone who is both artist and filmmaker—as well as an obsessive consumer of films himself.

Just as Openings can be considered a survey of the art world, it can also be considered a rich survey of film and film technologies. It is rare to be able to witness so clearly the development of a medium as a whole, but in its scope Openings makes plain film’s many evolutions, from black and white to colour, across aspect ratios, its improvements in quality—and brief deteriorations as the introduction of affordable cameras widened accessibility—and finally the massive shift from analog film to digital. Broader trends in filmic storytelling are also made clear, and it is fascinating to chart their movements: watch biopics fall in and out of favour, the flare up of gallery-as- site-of-first-date in the late ’80s and early ’90s, or the later rise of the thriller.

More curious is what remains the same. Over its 75 year history, films about art have stayed consistently infatuated with impersonators and imposters, and Openings is book-ended gracefully by two such frauds. In 1945, a young woman artist exhibits paintings which are secretly made by an older, unknown man who is in love with her; in 2020, an acclaimed artist, at the end of his career and unable to create new work, presents as his final paintings works that were actually created by his wife, who had sacrificed her own career for him.

One would expect Openings to say some- thing about art or film, but its strict format also throws a few surprises into high relief. The most significant trend in the final third was notable, and depressing, in its dominance. Throughout most of its four hours there are littered moments of film- making that are beguiling and intoxicating, that remind me of my sheer love of film, and that generate a curiosity for the worlds they show. And for the most part, the art world is depicted as fun, or outrageous, or delusional, or transcendent, or transformative, or at the very least, interesting or unusual. That is, until around the late 2000s when the tone noticeably—and permanently—descends into bleak seriousness. Openings’ final decades are filled with storylines dominated by murder plots, undercover police, and unlikeable, struggling gallerists who preside over businesses, more than places to show art. Even recurring tropes are recast in a dismal light: the freeloading student is no longer charming or amusing, but portrayed as pitiable and desperate. More times than not, the gallery setting is used to foreground themes of commerce, wealth and cynicism; and it is colour-graded to cold blues and greys, which are rendered cooler due to a pronounced lack of dramatic, filmic lighting. Especially when com- pared to earlier eras, the use of more ‘naturalistic’ light and supposed realism affords these scenes a sterile, anaemic quality which recalls the pragmatism of the office interior.

The corporate aesthetic is further emphasised by the ubiquity, by the 2010s, of high-definition digital. This technology is unforgiving and prone to cooling and flattening the world it captures, an effect perversely due to its ability to cram in more information and more spatial planes into its field of vision. At this point many filmmakers seem to be striving only towards showing more of the world, not so much concerned with what is in it: all this bland art, and in so much detail. Around the 2014 mark one gallery visitor exclaims “I feel like I’m back at the office!” and I agree—the gallerists dress like CEOs, the abstract formalism on display is destined for the boardroom walls, and absolutely no-one is having fun. What the implications are of this shift towards banal corporatism is for another essay to explore, but the power of Openings is that this shift is made starkly clear.

While it may have a lot to reveal about the art world, film history, and dominant cultural trends, Openings is also an exercise in archiving and editing. And in the tradition of structuralist filmmaking, it raises questions around the means of its own creation. Structuralism is usually associated with analog film, wherein the apparatus (i.e. the camera) and its material (strips of film) are brought to the fore, but Strang’s work helps to answer the question of what a digital structuralist video work might look like. An average structuralist work will focus on film stock/film reel/film’s ontological status as rapidly presented stills, so the viewer is plainly presented with the construction and structure of the film itself. When I watch Strang’s Openings I am similarly confronted with questions concerning the method of its material existence. I imagine Strang watching the original films; researching which titles to include; laboriously tracking down digital versions of each film from online film communities, file sharing communities and peer-to-peer networks; updating files whenever higher-quality versions are discovered; converting formats to the same type. One can consider the production of any artwork, structuralist or not, but with Openings, the means of its construction rest so plainly on its sleeves. I can see it in the cuts between films with opposing aspect ratios, film grain, colour grading and fidelity, and in the uncanny feeling of those reality-warping moments which Openings pro- vides in abundance, such as a seamless transition between 2010s New York and 1790s France.

Strang has certainly not assembled Openings haphazardly, nor relied on its clear organising rules to do the work for him. My initial reading of the work as an archival document was confirmed when, during the research for this essay, Strang kindly sent me his own notes which included comprehensive cataloguing of (amongst many other things) the common themes, tropes and character types present across the 120 films included, in addition to key figures, statistics and dates, and summaries of miscellaneous elements such as music and food. For the archivist, Openings provides an opportunity for endless taxonomies. Some examples, compiled by Strang:

Artworks that are damaged, stolen—
Cocktail (1988), La Haine (1995), If You Don’t, I Will (2014), ToY (2015), Stuber (2019), Bonnie & Bonnie (2019)

Disgruntled artists; unhappy with the installa- tion/selection/lighting of their work—
Girlfriends (1978), Cool Blue (1990), The Imperialists Are Still Alive! (2010), Tiny Furniture (2010), ToY (2015), The Meyerowitz Stories (2017)

Gallery dogs (dogs are a popular accessory at openings, they appear in several films)—
artist’s dogs (News from Planet Mars, 2016), dogs as art (Wiener-Dog, 2016), gallerist’s dogs (Boogie Woogie, 2009), guest’s dogs (New York Stories, 1989, Love and Other Disasters, 2006, Breaking Upwards, 2009)

One might assume that an artwork which also functions as an organised archival document, that foregrounds the process of its creation as much as its content, and requires exactly half of the average working day to view, would be rather dry. A work—to paraphrase film and media academic Misha Kavka—you don’t want to see, but that you want to have already seen. Such an assumption would be ignorant to the fact that Strang is an editor by profession, whose literal job is to create elegant, pleasurable viewing experiences. As an exercise in editing, Openings provides that simple and sublime experience of watching someone very good at what they do execute something to perfection.

Sit down to watch Openings for five minutes and you will find you have, in fact, been watching for thirty. Structured around an eternal cycle of characters arriving and departing—on foot, by car, on bike, by limousine, in distress, by force, in a daze, alone, with others—Openings is a wave that never breaks. And through the unbroken rhythm that Strang skillfully orchestrates across each piece of the assemblage, the watcher is lulled into an unbroken, hypnotic flow. The movement of a sudden departure may transform into a gliding entry; close ups of the canvas surface cut to faces peering closely from a different film altogether; tinkling laughter from one scene melts into gentle applause from another. And so, enter Openings in the early 50s and, without any noticeable stumble, you suddenly find yourself in 1978. One moment you may be in a film in 1989 but with no pause to interrupt, before you know it you are watching Natalie Portman fall for Clive Owen in 2004.

That memorable scene between Portman and Owen in Closer brings to mind an unexpected fact about film in general, which Openings uncovers: scenes of exhibition openings do a lot of the dramatic heavy-lifting, and often move rapidly towards the climax of the film, but are never in possession of the climax itself. They are the sites of some of the richest dramaturgy, characterisation, and relationship development, but what all of this is developing toward, and where it has come from, remains oblique to the viewer as we only catch a small, suspended snippet before we are thrust into the next scene. However the mystery, and our imaginative construction of the missing parts, can create an experience more compelling than if we had all the context. We infer romances, tiffs, oncoming breakdowns; wit- ness drinks thrown in faces and people coming to terms with themselves and others; we are privy to public meltdowns between friends—or is it sisters? We watch people meet for the first time, or are they lovers reunited? Semi-public spaces, fuelled by free drinks and charged with the un-inhibiting air of creativity and self-expression makes for a perfect site of action.

For all the disdain that many have for openings as places of networking, gossip, and barely disguised judgement of one’s peers, things do happen there. By contrast, a lot less has been happening in our collective lives over the last two years. And so Openings provides us, for now, with a forbidden pleasure. Walk into RM, narrow and blur your eyes slightly, and you could almost be in the buzzing scene that’s depicted on the projector, wrapped in the embrace of warm bodies, hum of smalltalk, and excitement of some low-grade social drama. But be careful, for accompanying pleasure one will often find pain—and Openings performs its own kind of unique torture. A horror story cliché of the ghost trapped in the attic, the author trapped in the hotel room, the weatherman trapped on February 2nd, 1993. You may watch the people arrive and depart, but you yourself may never leave the opening.

This article appears in The Art Paper Issue 02. Purchase to read more.

The Art Paper 02, LIGHT

Flashes and lumens and events and details, spiritual encounters, love and joy; occasional tears. Welcome to Issue 02 of The Art Paper.

Featured artists: Hilma af Klint, Sophia Al-Maria, Georgette Brown, Shane Cotton, Matilda Davis, Jeremy Deller, Lauren Gault, Domenico Gnoli, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Lonnie Hutchinson, Eilen Itzel Mena, Derek Jarman, Paul Lee, Ross Manning, Mata Aho Collective and Maureen Lander, Liz Maw, Michael Morley, Ani O’Neill, Catherine Opie, Reuben Paterson, Ann Shelton, Jasmin Sparrow and Glen Prentice, Daniel Strang, Salome Tanuvasa, Sam Te Kani, Teuane Tibbo, Jade Townsend, Amalia Ulman, Kate van der Drift, Taylor J. Wagstaff, Anto Yeldezian, JinCheng Zhao.

Contributors: Lucinda Bennett, Zoe Black, Jo Bragg, Connie Brown, Franca Chase, Nina Dyer, Simon Gennard, Becky Hemus, Eilen Itzel Mena, Moya Lawson, Maya Love, Romily Marie Plourde Marbrook, KM Marks, David J. Martinez, Constance McDonald, Maia McDonald, Sam McKegg, Sophie Pagani, Nayan Patel, essa may ranapiri, Israel Randell, Hamish Sawyer, Emil Scheffmann, Cameron J. Taylor, Chris Tse, Eleanor Woodhouse, Anto Yeldezian, JingCheng Zhao.

Specs: 152 pages, 24.1 x 16.8 cm