Output details

Guy Sherwin: Messages

Description

The publication Messages 2010, combining book with DVD, is an original artwork that seeks to reformulate and re-contextualise five key film works that Sherwin produced in the course of research into associative film montage that he began in the 1980s.

The publication juxtaposes the five films with a new photo/text work by Sherwin ‘Messages’ and a commissioned essay on children and language ‘The World of the Infant’ by writer/critic Nicholas Tucker. Together, they extend the scope of the research to include associative montage between the word as written on paper, the film image, and sound.

The featured film Messages is a study of childhood and language inspired in part by the work of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and by Sherwin's experience of his own daughter's development. A notable characteristic of the film is an exploration of memory that that runs parallel to the viewer’s unique memory of childhood

Rationale

The work draws on Sherwin’s prior research into non-narrative film structures, notably Short Film Series 1975-2012.

Forerunners of associative montage in film and/or text can be found in films by Vertov, Leger/Dali (1920s), Brakhage, Baillie, Larcher (1970s) and in the photo/essays of Berger/Mohr (1980s). Association is at the heart of poetry and the static visual arts (painting, photography), and even in contemporary advertising, but it is neglected in film outside the work of artist filmmakers such as above and their successors (O’Neill, Fanderl, Dean). The current research extends the work in associative film montage to include all aspects of the publication and its design. It thus develops its associational aesthetic in new directions while building upon this important field in artists’ moving image.

Strategies

The various components that make up the book and accompanying DVD: images, texts, drawings and sounds, work with or against each other in complex associative interactions.