WSA Staff Seminar Series: Gordon Hon Seminar

Abstract

Despite the fact that I have long since abandoned the practice of painting I have been unable to shake off my habit of thinking like a painter.

The main symptom is a recurring obsession with ‘the ground’ of the picture. This has informed a persistent, underlying theme in all my work particularly in my video work and, to my own surprise, even my recent experiments with narrative filmmaking. I would like to use this seminar to discuss a short film ‘A Hole with Two Ends’ that I made in the summer as part of the Oktopus Film Collective.

While editing this film I found myself returning to the work of Poussin and began to think about the ground in his paintings and in film in relation to the non/post-human, which in turn took me to the writing of Elizabeth Grosz. To extend Panofsky’s famous question into who or what is addressing us in Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego, could the answer be not death or the dead but the ground itself or even in Grosz’s terms, the Earth?

Biography

My background is in Fine Art painting and video, although much of my research and teaching has been in theory rather than practice, I have recently began to make short narrative films and have also been developing theory and practice in video essay form.
In addition to this and co-founding The Oktopus Film Collective with Amber Jacobs (Birkbeck College, University of London) my practice also includes the occasional exhibition, for example, Near Far at the WSA gallery Winchester (2013) and Picture Theory at Five Years gallery London (2011) and producing a radio series for ResonanceFM called Daily Subversions (2011).

Recent written publications include, Getting Lost in the Form: On Vertigo and Dissolution in The Video Essay: Parameters, Practices and Pedagogy, Issue 7 of The Cine-Files (online journal) Issue 7 (Fall 2014)published by the Department of Cinema Studies, Savannah College of Art and Design http://www.thecine-files.com.

The Origin of Palestinian Art (co-authored with Bashir Makhoul) University of Liverpool Press Oct. 2013, Blessed Oblivion: Palestinian Video Art and the Avant Doc, in Bashir Makhoul (ed) Palestinian Video Art: Constellations of Moving Image, Palestinian Art Court Al-Hoash Jerusalem 2013.