The (((shiver))) of perception
'I saw a blue sheet crumble like a dream' ... the illuminating nature of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's phenomenological temporalities.
He recalls a memory, of himself, his classmates and their teacher singing a song together, perhaps the national anthem or a nursery rhyme. It was a tune that he had grown up listening to and was familiar with. Yet, it was only when the teacher sang a singular note in the wrong key, did he really hear the song for the first time. The true realisation of the composition occurred when the mechanism of its melody had been disrupted. As the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt, familiaritas parid contemptum. It was in this incisive moment of breakdown that the boy began to perceive the subtle machinations of the song; a shiver of perception had passed. He would never listen to music the same way again. In light of my own encounter with this anecdote, an internal rupture had also occurred, unearthing a Me-World Chiasm1, from which many possibilities could spring forth.
(W)e must - precisely in order to see the world and to grasp it as a paradox - rupture our familiarity with it, and this rupture can teach us nothing except the unmotivated springing forth of the world.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945)
In Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film 'Contempt,' the famous scene (as shown below) depicts a heartbreaking conciliatory attempt that inadvertently foreshadows the eventual dissolution of the main couple’s relationship. The thinness of the phrase "I love you totally, tenderly, tragically" intimates the underlying disdain that the (male) character holds for his young but beautiful wife, mistaking his own ideals for actuality. Contempt, once seeded, propagates itself within a network of invisible forces, provoking violent complicities and complacencies.
To me, the artworks of Thai artist and master filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul are instigations into the dissolution of contempt (our thinking nature), which prioritises intellect over sense experience. His work is populated by devices that coax us into paying attention to the interstices of the material and apparitional, rousing the observer into active engagement. Through his cinematic interventions, he subtly converts the unassuming or latent subject into a perceiving subject by allowing them to experience their own perception through a complex milieu of shifting temporalities. What is remarkable is that he achieves this across different modes, under the simplest of premises that everything = cinema.
What I envy and admire about the director is that he primarily creates for himself. His autobiographical fragments and aesthetic tendencies are well situated and explored within the rich habitat of his work. His films reject linear narrative structures and also intrinsically mirror and amplify his own sentimentality or fondness towards certain individuals and places. He often uses the same actors across different productions. His art-making, a process he describes as "childlike" — connects to the memory or experience of being a child again. There is a sense of unhurried gratification and unadulterated curiosity in his filmic explorations, as he lingers sumptuously and un-remorsefully on the mundane and its forgotten intimacies. His liminal and often glacially-paced features have garnered much international acclaim and even mainstream appeal by the merit of their sheer beauty and distinctly oneiric quality. As someone flippantly exclaimed after I mentioned that he was one of my favourite living artists "aiyah, everybody likes him now".
Cinema, for Apichatpong is pure phenomenology, an observational endeavour compelled by a need to "capture moving things"2. His phenomenological constructions disclose the chiasmic3 nature of the body through the coordinated interplay of temporal phenomena.
ON BLUE (2022) is a companion piece to Apichatpong’s earlier short film Blue (2018) also starring Jenjira Pongpas Widner4. The piece surveys the progressive unraveling and intersecting surfaces of two traditional theatre backdrops of two landscapes rendered in a painterly manner. The first sheet depicts a sunset over a blue ocean and the second, the foyer of the royal place. Over time, some type of contraption or mechanism causes the fabrics to glide over one another until the entire structure collapses in upon itself.
There is a lush sensuality to the way in which the fabrics graze over one another. The footage of the slowly unspooling fabric is spliced against static shots of Jenjira sleeping, covered by a textured blue blanket. The massed folds of the blanket parallel the sensual curvatures of the backdrops melting into one another, creating luscious juxtapositions. The film comes to a close at daybreak and the piece brightens upon first light. A sensation of deep clarity envelops the scene as the light of the morning gradually diffuses the richness of the blue.
(((Ok I’m awake now, I’m paying attention.)))
To me, this work is about the total collapse of representation. The backdrops slowly lose the intelligibility of their surfaces as they begin to crumple and defy definition, forcing us to read them through sense-perception. There has never been a more beautiful meditation on phenomenology and simulacra than this film.
‘A Conversation (On Devastated Fabrics, On an Interpretation of Sculpture, On Metaphors, On Cinema and the Sun, On Animism, On Dreams)’ is my first object encounter with the artist’s intersubjective explorations. The work, a prelude to the installation ‘A Conversation with the Sun’ features a series of six machine-generated images which he had created through the neural network architecture platform VQGAN+CLIP5. If not for the unsettlingly synthetic appearance of the fabric which was the primary subject of the images (if we were to claim that there was one) these compositions could easily have been mistaken for photographs or stills from an existing film of his. The densely liquefying surfaces, create interesting blended topographies that bleed over and into one another.
My favourite aspect of the piece was the introduction of a particularly childlike gesture or moment of strategic whimsy — artless scribbles of draped fabrics, portals (windows, doorways) and tiny primitivist figures drawn over the glass in white permanent marker. The line drawings, perhaps etchings of the artist’s own private reveries, cast faint shadows onto the prints and meander loosely across the frame. This anomaly, a candid intervention onto an otherwise invisible and unremarkable surface, was the key disruptor of this work. This uncomplicated yet deterministic gesture, caused me to look twice and beyond the picture, unpacking and apprehending the simultaneity of its layered strata — as illuminatingly effective as a single note sung off-key.
A Conversation with the Sun6 is a large-scale video installation featuring a giant fabric that travels backwards and forward in space. There is a pulley system flanking both sides of the room that manoeuvres the fabric, turning it into a roving surface. The work resonates strongly with a quote by French phenomenologist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it's caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But, because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself."
I loved watching people find ways to relate to this work as they tried to watch the film while manoeuvring this soft obfuscation … encircling the fabric, entering the hollow of the fabric, avoiding the body of the fabric; flesh activated, engaging in the dance of perception.
The motorized fabric also caused me to think of ‘motor functions’ — the embedded systems of the body. Perhaps cinema can be thought of as a giant nervous system that regulates itself in accordance with the technologies that it employs. Apichatpong’s installation is interesting as it involves the body as interlocutor and invites us to devise for ourselves, a type of corporeal schematic for navigating the expanded domain of film. The vast fabric, which is attached to motorized contraptions at both ends, hangs like a giant sail from the top of the room and crawls slowly across the space, sometimes diametrically or in the same direction.
There is a projection of Apichatpong’s own personal recorded footage cast onto a large wall at the front of the room. The shifting drape of the fabric lends an air of plasticity to the filmic surface when it migrates close to and away from the wall. The audience gradually becomes aware of the agency of their own gaze as they begin to establishing their own frames whilst tracking the movement of the fabric.
If I wanted to express perceptual experience with precision, I would have to say that one perceives in me, and not that I perceive. Every sensation includes a seed of dream or depersonalization, as we experience through this sort of stupor into which it puts us when we truly live at the level of sensation.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945)
The projections, which form a comprehensive archive of the director’s recorded memories ever since he began his career as a filmmaker, are shuffled at random using Artificial Intelligence (AI). This does not particularly move me, especially after I spent hours of my life in December watching the frenetic video montages of 'Ho Tzu Nyen' that also utilise this particular technique7. All I can recall of the motion-images within this installation are the aimless trajectories of flying ants, flickering overlays of fires and flash cuts of a handsome young man laughing8. In the case of this piece, I feel like the content of the films are not the primary focus here. The projections are just an apparatus for highlighting the phenomenology of cinema and serves as a source of illumination, in order for Apichatpong to showcase his favourite medium of all — light.
Apichatpong’s main material is light, because cinema = light. Without light, films would not exist, as images are produced through the manipulation of light. The director has long professed a fascination with the sun, which to him is the embodiment of change and movement. In this piece, the light from the projector is the Sun, undertaking the natural phenomenon of how things shift visually in accordance with the sun’s trajectory.
The transitioning opacities of the moving cloth are mesmerising to watch. The light of the projector brings out the corporality of the fabric and vice-versa. The metamorphic process is caused by the light rays that make up the image interacting with the morphing fabric, there are points in time where it almost appears sculptural, carved by shadow. I didn’t even notice or care much about the sound in this piece, supposedly snippets of ChatGPT generated conversations between Apichatpong and key spiritual or artistic figures like such as Jiddu Krishnamurti, Salvador Dali, the Sun, and others9.
Perhaps, for the cinema to return images (and their viewers) to their pure forms, we must eliminate its crucial component, time. It remains a question of how to sculpt a dimension in which memory cannot operate. The state could be compared to dreaming while being empty. In that proposal, man and images are neither constructed nor propagandized. Then a genuine conversation between objects may take place without the need for art.
Apichatpong Weerathasakul, A Conversation with the Sun (2022), Digital Leaflet
I read somewhere that the approximate timespan for viewing this work is 20 minutes, but I recommend a good hour or two (which I spent across two different days) observing the fabric make its stately odyssey across the room.
The real question here is, how much time do you need to forget yourself? For the slippages of time to build up into sense experience? Before you can wholly experience the phenomenological depth of the piece, you have to first become fully situated in the situation. (People tend to not notice that the fabric is a live agent, and leave before its passage through space.)
To be at the heart of the universe, one must dissolve the thick veil of contempt, establishing direct contact with an inner presence that is always perceiving — allowing the body to wholly inhabit pure consciousness.
To attain the authenticity of image and experience, perhaps even art and its constructs can become a liability … in which case we must also abandon art in order to enter into a true radiance of being.
I would like to end this piece of writing with an excerpt from the biography of another artist also obsessed with …
"Change,”
Irwin thus observed for me one evening. “I’m becoming convinced that it’s obviously the most basic dynamic or physic of our universe. Kant talks about time and space as preexisting categories, as it were — how they must preexist any human perception — and I’d consider change in the same light. That’s obvious. What’s not so understandable is how much intellectual energy we waste trying to avoid this fact, contriving all these concrete systems and superstructures by which we …” His voice trailed off. “Really you should see this,” he presently resumed. "There’s like a haze of green floating beneath the pink and orange layers in the sky just above the mountain to my left. The sun dipped below the horizon about five minutes ago. The base of the mountain is purple already, and some of the canyons cutting into its face have gone jet black, but this greenish hue — it’s not smog.
it’s light.
(…)
“Let me tell you, it can get pretty entertaining out here, pretty spectacular.”Laurence Weschler, Seeing Is Forgetting The Name of The Thing One Sees (1982)
The fundamental interconnectedness between the self and the external world.
Internally and externally.
The intertwining or crossing over of the subjective and objective realms.
One of his frequent collaborators.
A VR counterpart at the Thailand Biennale in collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Katsuya Taniguchi also ran from 25-29 January in Chiang Rai.
I’m over it.
One of the only few footages that I remember with an actual human in it.