Yesterday I visited a small Brussels gallery, Galerie Micheline Szwajcer (rue de la régence) where I found an exhibition by Belgian photo/video artist David Claerbout b. 1969. There were three rooms, each containing one large projection. The first, Radio Piece (Hong Kong), 2015, was a continuous camera angle in slow backward zoom. It started in a zen garden, retreated to a conversation between two men in a room in which the zen garden was a photograph on the wall, then continued to reveal the exterior of a large apartment complex in Hong Kong. There were headphones supplied, which at times played natural ambient sounds connected to the accompanying scene, and at others played amplified scuffling sounds coming from far beyond the scene, as if existing in the space of the viewer. The other two works KING (after Alfred Wertheimer's 1956 picture of a young man named Elvis Presley) 2015 and Travel 1996-2013, were CGI animations made from photographs, slowly panning through their own imaginary spaces and inspecting different elements from multiple angles.
With their super slow movement, these projections seemed almost to melt between photograph and film. At first they appear as an image, and only after a few seconds do you become aware that there is a subtle but constant re-focusing occurring and you are drawn into the meditative time scale of the piece as it unfolds. Claerbout, a former painter, explains his move to digital media as a result of his interest in manipulating time (he often refers to it as a physical material). He suggests that these days painting is thought of as a static medium, as existing independently of the viewer and unaffected by observation, but that "historically it's different, the painting used to be an old kind of cinema."
In contrast to cinema as we know it today it is hard not to think of paintings as still. Physically they are static and unchanging, and at a glance they remain that way. Yet the process of looking slowly at a painting does enact a kind of cinema, a cascade of changes produced by shifting views, where relationships morph between different elements to produce new appearances and new meanings. Claerbout's films function almost as an illustration of this experience of slow looking. They are like images which explore themselves, drawing you in at their pace, and in their own direction. Perhaps more than a painting, they make abundantly clear that to really see them, you have to take the time.