Since the advent of moving image technologies, film and video artists have had a unique relation to place. We might say, as many have, that prior to the invention of cinema, painters often depicted real places, but in a static way, no matter how far removed from the conventions of realism a given painting or painter might have been and no matter how determined the painter was to depict movement. One need only think of Claude Monet’s famous paintings of the Rouen Cathedral, initiated in 1892, in which successive paintings of the same Cathedral suggest the passage of time, by way of varied gradations of colour and light from canvas to canvas. For many, however, the arrival of moving image technologies in the late 19th century gave material form to a promise: namely, that one could overcome the subjectivity of the painter, which cannot be separated from what the artist shows us in the depiction of a real place, by virtue of the objectivity that follows from the automatic registration of the camera itself. What the camera shows us, we assume, must once have been there. In this way, the moving image has maintained a privileged relation to place, insofar as the filmmaker has no need to simulate movement, since the film—and now, the video (digital or otherwise)—is motion itself. And what we see in motion, most striking of all, are real places; real places, moreover, that come to us as they were captured objectively in time.

One need only look at the Lumière Brothers’ Place des Cordeliers à Lyon (Cordeliers’ Square in Lyon), from 1895, one of the first films ever made and one that shows us, it seems, nothing more than what the title already promises: Cordeliers Square in Lyon in 1895. In this very short film, lasting less than a minute, we witness from one vantage point—from one camera set-up alone—an image of downtown Lyon, filled with people walking down and across a road, as well as a trolley, led by a horse, bustling with commuters. It has been very tempting to historians of film and photography to cite such films as founding instances of film’s capacity for objectivity, and thus as an important method and record of place, so much so that the crowning achievement of history as the successive documentation of everyday life might come to be realized in time. However, what is hard to ignore in the Place des Cordeliers à Lyon is the way that the camera shakes, how restless the image seems to be. It may be that the camera merely shakes in the wind, unsteadied on the tripod that has been secured as an instrument of objectivity. The shaking might also be derived from the hands of the camera operator who was either unable to disappear forever behind the image of place that he nevertheless produces. He might have felt the difficulty of measuring up to the place he so desired to record, and began to tremble, which means that the image will also tremble as if it were the very trace of an anxiety that cannot be known. It might also simply be that the film strip itself has decomposed in time, has shrunk in one way or another, such that the image—unsteady, this time, in the grip of the projector—moves in ways that it once did not. No matter what explanation satisfies us, what the film shows us is not a view of real places recorded, objectively, and shown back to us as if frozen in time. Rather, what we become aware of is the fascination with place itself that seems to have propelled the emergence of a new medium, or at least, corresponded with the artist’s desire to show us the places he loves and wants us to see as he sees it. If the camera of the Lumière Brothers shakes, what the shaking might most forcefully indicate to us is an affinity that the Lumière Brothers share with painters like Monet and Cezanne—how to depict motion in place (light moving across the façade of building, the movement of waves)—knowing, as the filmmakers did, that this “new” medium raised the stakes of depicting place quite considerably. If film advanced the artist’s capacity for depicting real places, it also meant that the recognition of a film as art, as something more than mere document, was challenged to a degree never experienced by painters. Put differently still, film and video artists can quite easily show us places in motion. More difficult, in a medium prized for its objectivity, is to show us place in the way that it has moved the artist, and then, in a way that moves its viewer; that is to say, the medium, the place, and the artist become merged, but never fully collapsed into one.

Moving Places features the work of seven important artists working in and with film and video, all of whom are dealing with, and drawn to, recognizable places: Venice in Scott Johnson’s Ruminando, for instance; the Brooklyn Bridge, in Joan Jonas’s eponymous video. These may be places you know, or think that you know. You may already find these places moving, have already been drawn to them for their interest, their significance, and their beauty, just as Mary Lucier seems drawn to the rodeo in Arabesque as an event that happens in certain kinds of places that are in possession of their own textures, procedures, and ways of understanding. It might also be the case—and again, much like Mary Lucier—that we will be shown something else in these places than we think we recognize, than we think we know, even if we see those things, too. In all likelihood, what brings us to “a place,” as a point of distinction—as a so-called destination point—is a general understanding of what a place is supposed to be like. If we find ourselves contemplating a summer holiday, for instance, we would not seek a place entirely unknown to us, even if we have never been there before. We rely on images, in many cases, to help us anticipate our ease and our pleasure at the satisfaction of an expectation. On holiday, we want to check out, to live comfortably with predictability in a place not our own, and in a way that life rarely, if ever, allows. It is summer, after all. Perhaps, then, the artist is never on holiday, even when she is somewhere other than where she lives, since art—and moving image media in particular—shows us something else in what we already know or recognize, something more than the artist already knows or expects in this or that place. What the artists featured in Moving Places seem to know is that every place is a moving place, that in every destination there is more than what brought us there, and that a camera does not freeze time or place: it is merely the beginning of something else in what nevertheless appears in the world before the camera as something that we all could see if we can get there.

—Brian Price

2013, 12 minutes
Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

Illusions & Mirrors, writes Peggy Gale, looks forward, perhaps with dread, to a future already lurking in shadowed, antique rooms – as Natalie Portman follows a man in black who appears on the shore, then hurries over the dunes to glide up stairs and through empty halls. She comes upon other, mysterious elements: a line of people on chairs along a wall, an older woman stroking the hair of “another,” of herself. Movement is cautious and tense, the narrative wordless and insinuating. Views fade and double, alternating clear and sharp with other, wavering scenes, like memories or hallucinations, portents of what-will-be. Finally we see Portman from a darkened window as she observes herself outside in sun and wind, back on the shore at the beginning.

2006, 18 minutes

Ruminado stems from an interest in the difference between predator and prey vision: while predators have frontal, binocular vision and a keen sense of depth, prey animals have peripheral vision and a keen awareness of motion. By emulating the visual space of a prey animal, wandering the maze-like alleys of Venice, Ruminando (Italian for “ruminating,” which connotes “chewing the cud,” or “reflecting”) plays upon the history of visual representation. It harkens back to the animals depicted on the walls in the caves of Lascaux, the architectural spaces in imperial Roman Wall paintings and the convoluted spaces in mythic labyrinths. Most importantly it engages single point perspectival paintings from the Renaissance, which are strongly frontal and evince the relationship between political power and aesthetics. The perceptual experience that Ruminando provokes is meant, in the end, to lead to thinking critically about how we see and how we “image” the world.

1992, 4 minutes

Pipilotti Rist's well-developed technique of mixing the personal, the pop and the mass cultural are distilled in this short work. Against a backdrop of tranquil Swiss alpine scenes, a small window presents a graphic record of human birth. This sequence, unsentimentally depicting what has historically symbolized female difference and power, insistently draws attention from the contemplative natural views beyond. The visual confrontation is suggestive of the ways in which different kinds of images are mystified through representation.

2011, 6:10

Path is part of a series of short, performance based works celebrating the unpredictable and rebellious universe. Situating the body in initially reassuring environments, these works illustrate how navigating even the most pastoral landscapes can result in turmoil between inanimate forms.

2004, 7 minutes

Arabesque derives from Lucier's five-channel installation The Plains of Sweet Regret. Writes Laurel Reuter, Director of the North Dakota Museum of Art: "[Arabesque] explodes into dance, the dance of the bucking horse, the bull, the clown, the rodeo rider. This is the resplendent West, but Lucier undermines its glory with loss. Brilliantly, the artist sets her choreography to George Strait's Country Western song, I Can Still Make Cheyenne. The music and the images cascade back over themselves, folding, repositioning, repeating, alive with rapture ... and, again, longing."

1988, 6 minutes

Still photographs, live video, and superimposed drawings created on a Quantel Paintbox are fused in this visual poem dedicated to a New York City landmark, the Brooklyn Bridge. Emphasizing its strength and beauty, Jonas locates the bridge as an iconic site in this meditative, cryptic study of identity and place. In Brooklyn Bridge, the transformative power of video is used to infuse the static photographs and naturalistic footage of the bridge with a mythic, animistic force, which is heightened by the artist's emblematic inscription of self onto the site.

2011, 2:35

In Day and Night, Jacobs teases out and toys with the ability of digital video to be infinitely and seamlessly manipulated, as well as its capacity for keeping reality just beyond the viewer's grasp. Here he uses images of nature as his source material, applying exacting technical effects to create a stunning fusion of the organic and the digital.